


Mind the Gap

by Maldoror_Chant



Series: Keep Those Angels Aloft [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: A goodly amount of smut as well, Angels are multi-dimensional creatures made of equal parts Grace and weirdness, Angst and Humor, Crowley is a smarmy manipulative bastard, Dean POV, M/M, Real Hunters don't talk about their feelings (even when they really should), So much swearing..., Swearing, aka self-esteem issues, narration is pretty crusty and unreliable as a result, newly established Dean Winchester/Castiel, warning for that nasty little sabotaging voice everyone has in their head sooner or later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-16 09:16:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 51,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13633311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: (Direct sequel to Penitentiary Wing)Castiel was back with the Winchesters - technically he had never been away.In the absence of any immediate life-or-death crisis, Dean had finally come clean. About feelings and stuff he’d been harboring for almost five years, about the sordid human desire he felt for an angel and his best friend. It’d taken a couple of tries and he had seriously considered drawing a diagram at one point, but he’d gotten through in the end. And incredibly, instead of laughing hysterically and then flying away, Cas had kissed him like it was the most natural thing to do at that point. Which was how they’d ended up in bed.And from there on, everything was grade A awesome. No more complications, misunderstandings or problems in sight. Nope. Smooth sailing.Of courseDean knew that wasn’t going to happen in this or any other universe. Because Life did not work that way for Winchesters. He knew it was going to blow up in their faces somehow. But for once, Dean was not going to let that stop him. Because...Because it was Cas. And five years was long enough.





	1. Hi

**Author's Note:**

> This fic went off in a somewhat odd direction - if that term can even be used anymore in the context of SPN's fandom, since the show itself gets pretty crazy at times and has given us a lot of strange and wonderful concepts to play with ^__^ Personally I love the idea of higher dimensions and spheres of existence, and that angels aren't truly physical beings at all and thus would not always think and react in the same way as humans would. Though this won't be immediately apparent, since this is Dean's POV, and he is not necessarily a reliable narrator. He's also got that attitude of his, a mix of 'beyond tough' and 'self defeating' all at once. Because angels aren't the only ones who can be complicated...

Dean was fast asleep.

_\- someone in his kill space - eyes on him-_

And then he was very effectively not.

Adrenaline shot through his system like a souped up taser shot. His right hand was already under the pillow - but his gun wasn’t there! 

“Dean?”

Dean made a strangled “Uh” sound, muscles coiling and right hand freezing in its blind grope under the cushion.

He came together in parts. Body still riding that fight-and-fight high (‘cause Dean’s default setting was not fight-or-flight). Eyes focusing slowly. Brain screaming all kinds of different info at him. Memory grabbing him by the throat and throttling.

“Uh.”

Cas was in bed with him. Naked. Under Dean’s sheets. Lying on his side. Head propped up on one hand. Watching him. (And Dean’s twitching fingers weren’t finding the gun because he wasn’t in some random bed in some random motel, he was in his room in the bunker, where he kept his colt on the bedside table like a proper homeowner should.)

Castiel had come back - had technically never been away. In the absence of any immediate life-or-death crisis, Dean had gotten some years-old shit off his chest. About feelings and stuff. He’d mostly managed to bypass any truly trite or ridiculous words. It’d taken a couple of tries and he had seriously considered drawing a diagram at one point, but he’d gotten through in the end. And incredibly, instead of laughing hysterically and then flying away, Cas had kissed him like it was the most natural thing to do at that point. Which, in a normal universe and with a normal guy, it might have been.

Memory punched Dean in the kidneys.

”...Uh...”

The angel he’d been hung up on for years - the ‘I am clinically insane to even think about this’ kind of hung up - the tangled ‘I love him like a brother and more and _this fucking hurts_ ’ kind of hung up - had kissed him and poofed them into Dean’s room. Dean had undressed that and then they’d fucked in this very bed. Cas had taken it up the ass without so much as a lifted eyebrow - just some unintentionally funny comments - and- and-

\- and he’d promised not to fly off anymore, or break Dean’s- er, balls again with crazy stunts.

Yeah. The only reason this wasn’t some kind of djiin spell or illusion was because it was just too weird and messy to be made up.

It wasn’t made up. It was completely weird. It was probably going to be messy. But Dean had decided last night that of all the regrets he would die with one day, this was not going to be one of them. And he was going to stand by that.

“Hi,” said Dean, putting his conclusion into words.

Or so he thought.

Hi? That’s what came out?

Dean Winchester. King of smooth.

Cas hadn’t moved or blinked. But his lips curved up slightly in the most natural of non-ironic smiles and he said, “Hello.”

That’s when Dean remembered something else important. It was Cas. That was why it wouldn’t be a regret. That was why it might even be okay for Dean to hang on to what he really wanted, just this once. 

The fact that Cas was still in bed with him meant he hadn’t changed his mind overnight either, even though he’d stared at Dean for every minute of it, guaranteed, and had seen Dean drool in his pillow and scratch his junk in the wee hours of the morning and snore. 

On the flip side, Dean had seen the guy trudge through Purgatory like a grumpy Robinson Crusoe in asylum PJs. He might look all nice and tidy now, but they knew each other too well. That took some of the morning-after fumbles off the table.

The small smile faded a little as Cas gave him a searching look. “How are your memories?”

“Uh...back? I guess?” Dean scratched his cheek. Shave was required.

“Do you remember everything now?”

”...Would I know if I didn’t?”

“You might notice missing time or discontinuities,” Castiel said seriously.

Maybe I would if my entire set of brain cells wasn’t busy giving me a slo-mo replay with color commentary of last night, was what Dean was not quite dead in the head enough to say, even without the application of coffee.

“S’fine.”

“Good.” 

He said Good last night too, the _first_ time he came. ‘Cause I made him come twice. The way his eyes went wide and distant and his lips parted when - down boy.

Other things were coming back to mind now. Naomi’s fucking around, sure, since Cas had brought that up, but mainly...

Dean remembered laughing like he hadn’t in years and he remembered feeling-...like he’d never felt before with somebody else in bed.

And it had felt right. And easy. It still did.

Dean bridged the foot of distance between them, slipping a hand beneath the arm Cas was using to prop up his head so he could pull the angel against him as he rolled onto his back. 

“This is an okay way of waking up in the morning,” Dean decided. “Even at the ungodly time of...” he squinted at the alarm clock, ”...six?

“It is four minutes past six.”

“Oh.”

Dean stared at the darkened ceiling overhead. Cas’s skin felt warm beneath his hand and against his side. 

Don’t stare me awake at the wrong side of dawn, was what Dean almost said. And Don’t ever leave me again, was what he also almost said.

“S’early,” was what Dean, now god-emperor of smooth, said instead.

“Are you going to sleep again?” Cas asked curiously from somewhere around the level of Dean’s collarbone.

Dean wondered why he asked that, then realized he’d unthinkingly pulled Cas back into the same position as last night, head on Dean’s shoulder and all that. It’d seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed like an awesome idea right now. 

“Nah, I’m awake,” (thank you adrenaline.) “Just gonna...take a minute to get going.” He yawned. Cas was...really nice and warm along his side.

When he blinked awake again, the alarm said it was past eight, the bed beside him was empty and his head felt foggy from too much sleep. Anything past six hours felt downright wrong if he’d not self-medicated with booze before bedtime.

This required Cas. 

Coffee. This required coffee. 

And Cas. Because he had to believe the bastard wouldn’t fly off to Timbuktu after everything they’d said. No, he would not. Definitely he would not, because Dean remembered how stressed Castiel was yesterday at the thought of either Winchester leaving the bunker without him. Oh hell, he was even locked up _in_ the bunker, so yeah, Cas was definitely around somewhere, and so was coffee.

 

\--- 

Because Life had decided to give Dean a rare break, both Cas and coffee were in the kitchen. No major life-defining crisis-moment choices needed to be made right this minute, Dean could have both.

Sam was there too, though, because Life was not above kicking a bit of sand in Dean’s face even while doing him favors. Not that he had a problem with Sammy, but there was a Sam Patented Conversation About Feelings that was going to happen here come hell or high water, and Dean would have preferred a bit of coffee and a few hours to brace for it first. 

He trudged towards the pot that forward-thinking little brothers had already prepared. The smell alone woke him up a bit, which was when the scene fully percolated into his brain. Dean had heard the soft tones of two men talking in the kitchen while he headed that way, low voices, serious timbre. They’d stopped before he got near enough to hear any words. Sam and Cas were sitting at right angles at the kitchen table in close proximity, heads together. And they were both quiet as he came in, Sam had just said, “Hi,” - because it apparently ran in the family - in response to Dean’s grunt. 

Dean took his first long sip of coffee, ignoring the usual burn to his mouth that was part of the morning process that put him together. Then he asked, “What’re we talking about?” because he could recognize heavy shit going down even at this early stage of caffeination.

“Nothing,” said Sam too quickly

“Yeah, pull the other one. What were you guys gossiping over, end of the world stuff? Head problems? Or just ragging on me behind my back?”

Sam rolled his eyes and spoke a bit waspishly. “Not end of the world stuff or anything serious, and I know you won’t believe this but it wasn’t about you at all, so butt out.”

“Yeesh, one of us here didn’t get laid last night.”

Sam’s jaw dropped. Dean sipped from his mug. He’d just halved the length of the eventual tortuous touchy-feely talk right there, he judged. Dean Winchester was back in the conversational saddle. 

“Urgh,” said Sam eventually after visibly sorting through several possible rejoinders - and being unable to give full vent to any of them with Dean smirking on one side and Cas looking at him all nice and proper on the other. “I’m not going to stoop to your level at this time of the morning, Dean. I have work to do. I trust you won’t defile the kitchen table if I leave.”

“I was going to have breakfast, bitch.”

“I’d feel reassured,” said Sam, getting to his feet, “but I’ve seen you eat breakfast.”

“Bite me,” Dean grumbled back, being the generous big brother he was and letting his lil’ bro get that cheap shot in.

“Huh-uh.” Sam gave Cas a loaded ‘we’ll talk later’ look which probably went right over the angel’s head, and trudged out the door leading to the inner recesses of the bunker and the file rooms.

Dean put his cup down on the counter and followed him out into the hallway. 

“Hey Sammy?” 

Sam’s Sasquatch step faltered and stopped up ahead. “Yeah?”

Dean leaned his back against the wall, eyes on the hardwood floor and arms crossed over his chest. 

“I never told you, but you know, I’ve slept with guys before. If you buy me a rainbow-colored sweater I will stab you in the lung.”

“...Dean?”

“Yeah?” Dean was still staring at the floor. He remembered doing tongue-and-grooves back when working construction in Cicero. 

“You’re as transparent as glass when you’re in hound dog mode, so I had already figured that out. I also figured you didn’t want to talk about it yet. It never crossed my mind to buy you any kind of sweater ‘cause I’m not a bloody idiot. Unlike you.”

“Yeah,” said Dean softly, lips curling up in approval at the craftsmanship. It was a good floor.

“Besides I knew how you’d react and I try not to die more than a dozen times a decade.”

“Keep up the good work.” Dean levered himself away from the wall, but something in the silence behind him made him stop and turn back.

Sam stood there with his hands in his pocket and a troubled look on his face.

“You guys...you going to be okay? That’s a lot to take in. I mean...he’s family, but he’s...Cas. It’s kind of- I mean, I’m glad for you guys, but hooking up like that-“

“Hooking up with the celestial being who can hear you perfectly well from where you’re standing?” Dean asked calmly and without lowering his voice (no point). 

That earned him a faint wince. 

Dean scratched the back of his head and reminded himself that he’d have to go to a hairdresser’s soon if he didn’t want to end up like his brother. Answers percolated beneath his fingernails, from mouthy to dismissive to a cold _don’t worry, nothing good ever lasts for us_ , to what eventually came out.

“Honestly, Sammy? I have no clue what we’re doing.”

“But that’s never stopped you before,” Sam concluded for him.

“’Bout sums it up.”

“I hope it works out.”

“Cas won’t go Crazy Stalker Girlfriend on me if it doesn’t. Not in his makeup,” said Dean who had already factored that in before throwing the dice on falling into bed with his best friend last night. Life gave Dean too many snake eyes to not consider all the fallout first. Not on shit that mattered. 

The look on the big girl’s face said clearly, ‘but I don’t want either of you to get hurt’. Dean though, he knew all too well that hurt happened. And death. Death and pain happened to Dean and all around Dean on an interval so regular it was like cosmic clockwork. He’d known since Lisa that he had no business getting into a relationship with anybody anymore. Anybody normal, that is. But now he’d hitched his wagon to a fellow Winchester-elect who couldn’t stay dead if he tried, and maybe Life would just let it work out for at least a few months before fucking them over again.

At least Cas knew what he’d signed up for. He’d signed up for it even before he knew there were side-benefits of the bed variety available. The angel didn’t scare easy, you had to give him that.

 

\---

 

Dean topped up his coffee and took up Sam’s vacated chair at the table. 

It occurred to him distantly that this should feel awkward. Not rabbiting out of the other person’s bed after the mandatory ‘yeah, it was great, sure I’ll call’ was already out of the norm, having breakfast together was like the lunar landing of morning afters. Then Cas effortlessly took it to a whole new level of strange, because he hadn’t moved an inch, he was still sitting there in a suit, trench coat and tie, both forearms resting on the table, face on unsmiling neutral. A normal human would have a coffee mug to fidget with or breakfast to focus on. Not here. Dean had those blue peepers full on him and nope, Cas still hadn’t picked up on the ‘staring is rude’ social norm after all this time. 

But it wasn’t awkward. It was Cas. 

Dean took another deep drag of coffee and relaxed against the chair back. ”So what’s the plan for today?”

“We need to get our defenses in order.”

“Good plan. And long term?”

Cas gave him a steady look that suggested he needed a few qualifiers in order to tackle that one.

The question could indeed go in ten different directions, some Dean was in no way equipped to handle yet, so he decided to stick to the one that had come up in association with the word ‘defenses’. 

“What’s the situation-” he hooked his free thumb towards the ceiling. “After yesterday, have you been kicked out of the penthouse?” Again. 

“No.”

The memory of Naomi’s utterly _pissed_ expression flashed through Dean’s mind.

“I left,” said Cas with a deliberate tone that held a surprising edge to it. 

Dean remembered what Cas had looked like yesterday: gripping Dean’s wrist and shattered to the core after five months of fucking solitary. It’d break many a human, never mind an angel who had spent a previous eternity with the constant companionship of his brothers and sisters around him. This edge to his tone was the diametrical opposite of yesterday’s look, but that just made them two sides of the same coin. Dean felt his own feelings similarly split; he felt weirdly, _fiercely_ protective of his buddy when thinking of the shit he’d gone through, he wished he could just take a magic sponge and wash the whole experience away, but he also felt proud that Cas had turned that around and told the holy brigade to sit on their angel blades and spin like old-fashioned vinyls.

“Good for you,” he said softly. Then he frowned. “Is that going to put you on a hit list? Or is there...I don’t know, consequences?”

Castiel tipped his head thoughtfully. “I think we are all working out what this means,” he said, using the heavenly ‘we’. “It is complicated and fluid up there. I think...I hope that Naomi will accept my offer to help her maintain stability in exchange for leaving us alone.”

Dean’s lips jerked back in a silent snarl. “Naomi? Dude, that’s fucking insane. She’s Big Brother in a power suit.”

“She could have killed us all months ago. She didn’t. For her, that intervention of hers was almost benign. I think Metatron scared her. He forced her to confront some of her more intransigent beliefs. We should be careful, but...” Cas’s gaze fell to the table top. “I don’t want to be at war with my Brethren, Dean. Not if I can help it.”

“Okay.” Dean could understand that. He just hoped those fucking halos gave them that option - and he wished he had the power to say he’d throttle every last one of them if they put Cas through even a tenth of the same shit again.

“I am more than when I Fell the first time,” Cas continued. Dean only lent half an ear, his mind on defense, strategy and how much he wanted to choke Naomi just a little. “As a Seraph my Grace is not bound to the Host. I could presumably stay on earth forever, like an archangel - but without the political nightmare that would imply. I’m hoping Naomi and the others worry about their own affairs and leave us to ours. As long as we don’t break any of the rules.”

Dean’s attention centered. “Rules?” 

“Don’t interfere with the movement of the spheres,” Cas said calmly, looking at the table as if reading the list off its wood grain. “Don’t disrupt any celestial plans. Don’t ally with the powers of Hell. Heaven doesn’t like that. And don’t generate any nephilim. Though of course that latter doesn’t apply. Fortunately. It is good for our sakes that Jimmy was the one who accepted me. If our genders might have meant we could procreate, they would have preemptively killed us years ago.” 

Dean had been thinking about rustling up breakfast, but death threats kept him nailed to the chair. “Huh?”

“Killed us.” Cas seemed to think Dean should know what he was talking about. “And left a crater the size of the bunker if we’d offered any resistance. The Host take the matter of Nephilim very seriously. As they should. I...thought. Once.” A strange distant look came into his eyes.

Dean lifted a finger and drew a circle in the air with it. “Rewind a bit, though. How would they know we’re, um, procreating? Or rather, _not_ pro- that we’re screwing? You didn’t broadcast it on Angel Radio or anything, did you?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. I’d rather-“

“Many in the Host think we’ve been intimate for years.”

Dean spilled the coffee. “What?!”

Castiel looked at him blankly as if this was elementary, my dear Watson. “I Fell and fought Lucifer at your side because it was the right thing to do. But at some point it was evident I loved you as well.”

Fortunately Dean had put down the cup at this point. Yeah. Only Cas would just say that like he was reading off the morning headlines. Dean gaped and tried to hide how much his nerves were suddenly jangling. That was a real heavy word to drop on the table before 9am and the second cup of coffee.

Cas, of course, was completely oblivious. He’d gone back to looking Dean straight in the eye in the exact way a human would not.

“Feelings are more obvious among my kind. I never thought to hide it anyway. It was known you inclined to both genders. The more...down to earth personnel assumed we had sex.” He made it sound like it was an add-on, and no great deal at all. Reinforced when he added indifferently, “I didn’t correct them.” 

“Really?” Dean said in a voice that was almost as gravely as Cas’s.

“Yes. I don’t mean the Beings of the higher echelons. They prefer not to imagine such things until forced to. But as far as the garrisons go, it’s been a running joke for years.”

Oh. Oh right. That was just awesome. Somewhere up in Heaven was a bunch of ground-pounder angels sharing the celestial equivalent of a smoke as they kept watch on the borders and joked about Dean’s love life with their fallen brother. 

“You’re serious?” he found himself asking.

Cas’s eyebrows flickered up briefly as if he did not see the point of the question, but he still answered, “Yes.”

“Of course you are.”

“Don’t you remember?” Cas looked suddenly concerned. “Do you feel a gap in your memories? Several of the angels you met mentioned it over the years. Balthazar repeatedly.”

“I thought that was a joke...”

Cas nodded once. “Yes. ‘It’s funny because it’s true’. That’s what Crowley said.”

If Dean’s eyes had gotten any wider they’d have dropped out of his skull and ended up in his mug. 

“You mean,” he said in a strangled tone, “that all those cracks from Crowley and the rest of the black-eyed bitches about- about my pet- my- they seriously thought that?”

“Yes. Incorrectly. Until now.”

Dean’s mind buzzed. 

...So in the one working bathroom stall Crowley had organized in hell for his Queue of the Damned, somebody had carved ‘Dean Winchester sucks angel cock’ or something equally pithy.

Cas looked down briefly at the small puddle of coffee on the table. A flick of fingers cleaned it up. 

Oh, and Purgatory. Couldn’t forget Purgatory. Benny had bitched continuously about the stupidity of fighting through Monsterland and back for the sake of a quasi-suicidal angel who’d just act like chum. Until a few days after Dean had found Cas again. Benny had given Dean a particularly penetrating stare after the second or third fight of the day, like he was seeing him anew, then he’d said, “Now I get it,” and from then on out he’d defended Cas like he’d defended Dean, like he knew he’d not get one out without the other. Then there’d been the horde of various critters who’d make cracks at Dean about ‘your angel’. Dean hadn’t paid much attention, they didn’t know him like Benny did; he just thought they’d made stupid assumptions because he was protecting Cas-

Yeah, snorted a small part of Dean, you protected him like some early caveman defending his mate. That kind of primal behavior was something Purgatory’s denizens would pick up on. 

“Anybody else know about this?” he found himself asking in a voice that was tipping towards hysteria - a tough, manly freak-out, rather.

Castiel frowned. “Anybody else? Most mortals do not know either of us exist.”

“Oh. Right.” 

“There are humans who know the reality of this world. Some are psychic, others know you. The ones who saw us face the apocalypse and the Leviathans together will have guessed we’re close. Maybe made assumptions. If not-” Cas straightened up and gave Dean a look of faint concern. “I’m sorry, maybe I should have mentioned this last night. This kind of union is rare and it can spread waves of-” then he stopped and looked at the hand Dean was waving weakly in front of his face.

“No. S’okay. Don’t tell me.” Because of course folks like Missouri would know, and a few hunters once associated with the Campbell clan might have guessed, and any witch who talked to demons might get wind of this and spread the rumor, and in a dingy bus-stop somewhere in the Midwest, some bastard had undoubtedly carved “DW + C” inside the drawing of a cock. 

Dean realized he felt rather upset about all this, a bit exposed...but above all he was completely pissed off, because it was _fucking unfair!_

“We weren’t even screwing!”

Whether he felt the same way or not, Castiel did not seem to think it worthy of comment, so he didn’t. He just sat there looking out across the kitchen, thinking deep and beautiful thoughts about bees or something.

...Fucking unfair...Dean could have had that all along. It felt like Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and a large part of planet Earth had been snickering over the wild sex they were having while Dean Winchester was still nervously gripping his hands like a debutante, calling himself twelve kinds of idiot for even contemplating the possibility. Unfair. And also his fault for being a perfect candy-ass about it, which only made it worse. 

“Well,” Dean sighed, “I was going to tell Sam anyway, but now I’m glad he stumbled onto us last night. Poor guy’s already the last to know.”

“I need to go do some research for him,” Cas announced, getting up. “We have to find the solution to the wards soon. We can’t stay here forever, and I need to leave with you and keep the bunker secure behind us.”

“Yeah, yeah, go ahead.” 

Cas headed off to the library. Dean went to top up his mug and then stopped by the freezer, his mind running like a hamster on a wheel. Not over the fact that everybody and his hellhound knew he and Cas were fucking, or the unfair fact that everybody had assumed they were fucking back when they really should have been fucking if Life were kinder to Winchesters.

Dean grabbed a couple of burritos out of the freezer and dropped them on the plate Sam had used for toast, if the crumbs were anything to go by.

What was doing Dean’s mind in was Cas’s simple words. ‘It was evident I loved you as well.’

Dean had realized the very next moment after Castiel said that, that the angel meant, well, straightforward love, the brother-in-arms kind. The kind that would push Cas to throw himself into the line of fire for them, to do all the crazy heart-rending stuff they always seemed to do for each other. Cas felt that way for Sam, too, to much the same extent. And that was their bedrock, that was _them_ , the three of them. Their family. Their crazy fucked-up constantly damned or dying family. 

It’d just picked up some extra layers between himself and Cas. They’d accumulated slowly, building off their bond when they weren’t looking. Stuff like...well, there was a lot of stuff. And sex. There was sex now. In fact on Dean’s side of the ‘stuff’, sex had crept in pretty damn fast years ago.

Dean bit into a burrito - he’d forgotten to nuke the fucking things. Cursing shortly under his breath, he grabbed his plate and headed towards the microwave.

He wondered when it had started. This kudzu of a thing that’d invaded every inch of him. Maybe it was when Cas had Fallen for him. That’d make sense. Except back then, shit between them still felt pretty straightforward. Cas was just doing the right thing, to his credit. Dean suspected it was one of the less elevating moments of their acquaintance that had planted the seed, that’d changed the already complicated relationship between a human and an angel into something tangled and all-consuming. Maybe when he’d dragged Cas to that brothel and felt obscurely relieved when it’d blown up in the poor angel’s face. Or when Cas had stared up at Dean, drunk and mad and hurting from the same absentee-father crap Dean knew all too well, all grumpy and edgy and hot - damn did he look good when he lost the starch in that collar.

He probably should have said something back when he realized he had the hots for the guy. It seemed blindingly obvious _now_ that he should have spoken up, but even back then a part of him knew he should come clean. It felt dishonest not to. A human would have picked up on his feelings, even if only subconsciously, but Cas would have been totally oblivious, and that felt wrong. 

But Dean was more comfortable stitching himself up without anesthetic than he was with talking, so there was always a reason to delay. He’d tell Cas right after the latest crisis. Okay, maybe after the next life-or-death situation was resolved. Or maybe wait, tell him right at the end just before they died (the blaze of glory finale looked pretty inevitable back then). Or maybe never tell him at all and spare them both a headache when they should be concentrating on the end of the entire bloody world. Back then he’d been sure Cas would be uninterested - more like disgusted - so what was the point in embarrassing himself and potentially making their friendship feel weird? Or maybe worse than weird. Back then, the chain between them was still new and untested. It felt dangerous to give it too hard a tug. For Dean’s sake and also for Castiel’s, because Dean already knew they had their hooks into each other on many levels and if something ripped them apart, it would leave a bloody great hole (as later events proved all too well.)

So when Sam did his swan dive into the Cage and most of Dean had simply shut down, it was on Lisa’s doorstep he’d ended up. Lisa was simpler. Warmer. Human. Scary too, because Dean knew he’d screw that up sooner or later. But it was a manageable scary. She was a tough cookie, he wasn’t her entire world or anything. Even if he died or disappeared, she’d not be devastated. That made staying okay. And he had loved Lisa, really. 

It was just that he loved Cas a hundred times more.

...That sounded downright trite. Those two had never been on the same level. ‘Love’ was lame and overused, it just didn’t seem big enough and deep enough and twisted enough to fit him and Cas and all they’d gone through together.

The microwave pinged at him. It had been doing so for awhile, Dean realized. He opened the door and closed it again in one short move and turned away.

Forget trying to hang a fucking label on it. The raw and flayed truth of the matter was, if Cas had come back to him then, had talked to him instead of Crowley, Dean would have dropped Lisa and Ben that very instant. What was worse, he’d have felt guiltier for disappointing and hurting Ben than Lisa. Dean...was not a very nice guy and a truly pathetic boyfriend. That, he already knew. 

Dean’s boots clumped as he walked down the three steps out of the kitchen, like a knuckle rap of reproof.

Maybe that was why Cas had not shown up at his doorstep. Because he knew Dean would drop everything, and because he knew Dean would hate himself for it - and hell, that was what-ifs and maybes. Mistakes had been made on all sides, the world kept trying to drive itself off a cliff, Naomi had happened - _repeatedly_ , like fucking machine gun strafes - 

In the library, Cas glanced up from his book in surprise as Dean stopped at his elbow.

Dean leaned down and kissed him long and deep.

Because it was Cas.

And it would almost certainly blow up in their faces in a few months, Life being what it was, but this time Dean Winchester was going to hang onto this with all his might and for now at least, it would be okay.


	2. Only Two Weeks

Life did not give Dean Winchester a few months of reprieve. It gave him two fucking weeks. 

\---

 

_Fourteen days before the phone rang..._

 

“I take it it’s going real well,” Dean said sardonically, eying Sammy’s fingers. They were scrunched up in his overlong hair as if pulling his scalp off might help with the issue at hand. Mr I’m A Stanford Grad was glaring at a mess of symbols on three different pieces of paper with a book plonked between them like an arbitrator.

“The warding is complex,” Cas informed him, sitting on the opposite side of the library table. He had four books stacked on his left side and seven books stacked on his left. Dean had asked why he hadn’t actually opened any of them, only to get a strange ‘why would I do that?’ look in return. Apparently angels didn’t need to flip pages like common mortals if they didn’t feel like it, Cas just needed to glower at them a bit and the books surrendered their knowledge out of a blend of fear and respect.

Dean sent a beer bottle sliding towards his brother, who picked it off the table and took a swig without looking. His own bottle in hand, Dean straddled a chair at the head of the table, took one look at the nearest set of scribbles and decided he’d not be able to contribute anything on that level. He had his own brand of hunting to do. Including in the most basic sense of the term: provisioning.

“We’re out of food.” He should know. He’d scraped up everything reasonably fresh left in the fridge at lunch time and stuck it between slices of bread (Sam had been too busy with books to bitch about the taste). “I’m going to make a supply run in Lebanon.”

Yikes. Dean could actually _see_ the sudden tension radiate off Cas like heatwaves, even though the angel kept his eyes firmly fixed on the small stretch of table on which rested his forearms.

“Maybe we can go grab some take-out,” Sam suggested, eyes still nominally on his book but completely focused on the other side of the table.

If anything, the silent scream got worse. 

“All three of us, I meant,” Sam said, falling over himself to correct the misunderstanding. “Some time away from this crap would do us good. The three of us. Right. We can break the angel warding, just for now- “

Cas still didn’t move or say anything. Dean was a little concerned, without being able to pin down why exactly, that Cas seemed uncomfortable even expressing his fears out loud, but he didn’t need to, yeesh, this was like watching the end of Ol’ Yeller and Dean was now expected to go grab a shotgun.

The brothers swapped a glance. ‘We’re going to have to deal with this at some point,’ their shared look said. ‘But not today,’ they concluded.

“Let’s get this bitch licked first,” said Dean, tapping the nearest piece of paper with a finger. “I can rustle something together, we won’t starve.”

“Sounds good,” said Sam, looking carefully at Dean rather than at Castiel (didn’t need to look that way to feel the sudden drop in tension.)

Dean nodded fractionally as he lifted his beer. 

Both their gazes flinched involuntarily towards the third party present. Cas was still staring at the table and there was something hurt and _beaten_ in the faint slump in his shoulders, in the way his fingers had curled into loose fists. He knew this knee-jerk reaction was not rational or helpful, but he couldn’t stop it...Once they properly proofed the bunker, Dean was going to start his own research project. How to booby-trap Naomi’s heavenly desk with holy oil, a pound of nails and a grenade.

“So, spaghetti-o’s it is,” Dean said, getting to his feet. 

“Oh. Great. I haven’t had those in ages,” said Sam with fake enthusiasm that wouldn’t have fooled a five year old. 

“Hey, shut up, you ingrate, you grew up on that stuff - and grew up and then grew up some more, so obviously they’re good for you.”

“That’d be the insane chemical cocktail in the sauce sending my pituitary gland into overdrive,” Sam grumbled, turning back to his books. 

“Whine too much and you won’t get any dessert.”

“What’s for dessert?”

“Twinkies,” said Dean, who liked cooking and eating good American meals, yes, but finding a bunker at his disposal, had also made sure they were ready for any post-apocalyptic scenario one might envision.

“Wonderful,” said Sam in the same tone of voice and cadence as he would have said, ‘Shoot me now.’ “Come on, Cas,” he added in something like desperation, knowing that Dean could live off a booze-canned-food-and-Twinkie combo for the foreseeable future, like a roach, and that angels didn’t eat. “I’m sure we’re nearly there. What if we take this symbol and write your name in Enochian inside? Would that work?”

 

 

It was past ten pm when the latest attempt at Cas-exclusive angel-warding failed, but Cas said he now had ideas on how to proceed. 

Dean cleared his throat and lifted an eyebrow at Sam. Sam, looking bushed, stared back without comprehension for a second, until the faint tilt of Dean’s chin clued him in. He rolled his eyes, but then he faked a stretch - the additional yawn was not faked - and said, “We should call it a night. I’m burned out. Let’s pick it up tomorrow early, ‘kay?”

Castiel looked ready to object- Dean got up, leaned over, grabbed him by the wrist, and led him off towards Dean’s room. When he swung the door shut behind them, Cas no longer looked all that interested in wards. His clear-eyed gaze was fixed on Dean and he looked...intrigued? In a good way, Dean thought. 

Dean didn’t stop moving until he and Cas were on the bed with their clothes on the floor again. He expected Cas to say something - what, he wasn’t sure, but _something_. All Cas did was look at him with that deep long stare as if nothing Dean could do was going to particularly surprise or upset him. He looked down at their naked bodies without any sign of embarrassment or nervousness, didn’t question how they’d gotten there so fast, didn’t wonder why Dean then applied the brakes and spent the next thirty minutes making out like they were both a couple of teenagers on mom’s couch. Dean kept getting a bit confused by how much Cas did and did not know, and his utter, well, calm at all this, but hey. It was Cas. 

That wasn’t why he was taking it slow tonight. It was because he _could_. He was telling Life that this was not something they needed to rush, that they could take their time, that they could spend all night just exploring with mouths and fingertips if they wanted to because tomorrow night they’d go on to the next chapter of Sex with Angels and then the next chapter and the next, and the book was gonna be longer than Lord of the Rings, the whole trilogy and all those follow-up novels too.

They still ended up having sex that night, of course, because, well, of _course_. But Dean felt he’d made his point. 

Cas asked a few more hilarious questions even a virgin wouldn’t think to ask, and failed to ask the more obvious questions, because Cas. 

There were questions Dean should be asking but didn’t, like, ‘you sure you want to bottom again?’ and ‘you ever want to _not?_ ’. Dean knew himself well enough to admit he’d have to work up to that one. It’d taken him five years to stop being chickenshit about his feelings, it’d taken five years until he and Cas had finally worked out enough crap between them to stop hurting each other regularly and get here instead. Cas would hopefully not mind that it could take Dean another five years before he wasn’t chickenshit about taken it up the ass like he expected his partners to do. It wasn’t that Dean was afraid of pain, because seriously, pain? After years in Hell and every other hunt in the Winchester diary, an ache in the rear wouldn’t even register. But there was just something there, in the thought, that he didn’t like.

Cas didn’t comment or seem to mind when Dean got his lubed fingers back into that fine ass again. Dean told himself that if Cas asked to switch, he’d try it. That was good enough, surely.

And in the meantime...

Cas was on his back this time, a pillow under his lumbars propping him up - Cas looking perfectly unruffled because apparently this was in the Angel of the Lord handbook, Extended Edition. Dean urged him to wrap those lean legs around Dean’s ribcage and help anchor them together, and he pressed in gentlyohfuckyeah...

Cas did that blinking thing again as Dean eased out and back in an extra quarter inch. Little fast flickers of his eyelids, as if trying to make out something through a sudden glare. 

This...was good - hell it was _great_ \- that is, the position was good because like that Dean could be sure there were no signs of discomfort, no hesitation. Should have done it like this last night.

Cas stopped blinking, stared at his hands slowly rising over Dean’s arms and biceps. Dean had one fist planted in the mattress near Cas’s hip, the other helping to hold him in place. Cas’s fingers swept over Dean’s shoulders, his neck - Dean bit his lip and thrust in another half inch while his inner primate gibbered and howled at the moon, because _fuck!_

Then Cas touched Dean’s face, brushed his lips, lifted those blue eyes to meet Dean’s- 

At which point Dean realized his instincts last night had been correct, much better to do it back to front, being scrutinized like that while his cock was buried in Cas’s body was off-putting to say the least.

“Cas- thousand yard stare- we talked about this-” Dean said between incandescent blazes of pleasure, because it was Cas, and Dean could actually say this stuff to him.

Cas looked puzzled and glanced down - way down. “I wasn’t looking at your-...” a faint gasp interrupted him as Dean pushed in enough to start hitting a few fun parts. “Your genitals,” Cas continued because of course he would, as if Dean hadn’t known what he was talking about. 

Dean felt that weird bubbly laughter creep up on him again. He managed to keep it down to a ragged grin. 

“Yeah, but it applies to a lot of things.” So fucking tight- no wonder, this ass was in mint-shape condition, only seen one previous use- ngh. “Huh....Just...close your eyes. It’ll highlight the feelings...”

Cas rode out a twitch and then gave him a dubious look. He seemed about to comment. Nothing urgent or problematic, Dean judged, just one of his Cas comments. But then he obediently closed his eyes instead and damn...now Dean could watch him, could look at _all_ of him. See a small silent gasp part his lips, see the faint flush spread across his cheeks, over his lips...See that nice cock erect in the nest of small black hairs twitch and bead a little at the tip- Dean bit his lips savagely and forced himself to slow down so Cas wouldn’t lose it so fast this time. Not that Dean gave a flying fuck about that, but Cas was...trusting him with something here, with...Dean’s brain was starting to melt and become a bit too primal for advanced thinking. Instinct told him to make it slow and real good for his angel. Let it build. Make him come when he was dying for it. 

Cas’s hands went into reverse, down Dean’s shoulders and arms, over his chest, back up to his neck. Dean caught one of those long fingers in his mouth and licked. The fingers stilled, a tiny scrunch of expression crossed Cas’s face, as if this had thrown him for a loop. Dean felt his lips curve into a smile and he kissed the palm, the wrist, nudging the hand away and allowing it to start exploring again. Cas’s expression smoothed and the fingers started to trail up and down once more...who knew he’d be so tactile? 

Dean realized he was fully sheathed. He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, searched for spiderwebs, counted the seven cracks in the paint forward then backwards. Because he was going to take his time and make it last, dammit. 

Cas didn’t look uncomfortable when Dean chanced a glance. He did not look bored, or impatient, he was not moving, not jerking his hips- there was no body language going on there at all, just those hands dancing up Dean’s arms again. Face calm, a little scrunched up as if all this puzzled him ever so slightly. Eyes still closed, obedient soldier...fuck, Dean really-...really did love the guy, it was kind of scary. 

This would have been an awesome time to say that. But Dean hunted nightmares for a living, had gone through Hell, punched angels and demons in the face, had shot the Devil in the heart and stabbed Dick Roman in the neck; he had nothing to prove to nobody, even himself, so he was going to allow himself to not babble on about his feelings like a Jerry Springer special and not wonder if that was one more thing he was being chickenshit about.

Cas kept his eyes closed while Dean slowly increased the rhythm, and for the following few minutes. He kept them closed while he came with an arch to his back. His body language hadn’t given Dean much in the way of signals, just a flutter and sudden tightening around Dean’s cock. Dean barely had time to get his hand in play to make sure it was extra good, give Cas that little pull and faint twist to drive the pleasure even higher. Cas was panting, lips parted (oh fuck) but eyes still closed as his body stopped shaking and eased down and his eyes were still closed when Dean lost it (because how the hell could he not?) and started rutting in him deep and hard as _everything_ just caught up with him and ripped that orgasm out of him and wrung him out. 

Cas kept his eyes closed when Dean pulled out, slipped off the condom, removed the pillow and kissed Cas’s shoulder, wiped him clean with a corner of the sheet.

“You can open them now,” Dean said, realizing he’d have to actually say it.

The blue eyes fluttered open. The pupils were dilated and hazy. Score.

Dean didn’t ask him to stay this time. He knew Cas would. It wasn’t even midnight. That was okay. Dean felt great and ready for sleep, like he had a bottle of the finest bourbon inside him. 

Cas stared him awake at five thirty in the morning this time. And even that was okay. Dean simply ruffled the dark hair, pulled Cas back against him and dropped off again. Knew he’d wake up in another hour or three. That Cas would be gone, but would be in the kitchen or the library. 

All good.

 

_Thirteen days..._

 

Dean and Sam ordered from the limited options of Lebanon’s only diner, then with great synchronization crossed their arms over their chests and turned to give the third person at the table a _look_.

“So. Cas.”

Cas stopped staring at his glass of ice water to stare at Dean instead.

“You need to relax now.”

Cas’s gaze went from Dean, to Sam, to his own hands on his lap beneath the plastic table as if wondering what more he could relax. Then tentatively he crossed his own arms over his chest, a quick glance at Dean to see if he was doing it right.

Dean shook his head. “Not what I meant. Look...we got the warding sorted. Bunker’s angelproof, demonproof, ghostproof, I don’t think even a bad thought could squirm its way in there. And you can blink us back there in a pinch if you need to. So...” he waved one hand at Cas. 

Cas looked completely confused and no wonder.

Fortunately there was a Winchester present who was a decent communicator. “I understand that you’ve been through a lot these past five months,” Sam said softly. “But Cas, you have to unlearn this guardian angel shtick- we don’t mind your protection, relax, but we don’t need you hovering.”

“Kind of a style cramper,” Dean muttered into his beer. 

He’d had a word with Sam earlier, just the two of them. Explained a bit more about where Cas was coming from, what the fucking halo brigade had put him through. Sam understood. But understanding only went so far. They’d fixed the warding issue, the bunker was safe, they’d finally gotten out of the concrete pillbox this evening to relax. As long as one could ‘relax’ when their guardian angel - or possibly mother hen - expected the two Winchester brothers to march in lockstep two feet apart with Cas right behind them at arm’s length, which was bound to invite comment in anything-goes places like San Fran and Berlin, let alone Lebanon.

It took most of dinner to hash it out. Eventually Cas promised not to be an overbearing guardian angel anymore, however much it made him tense and miserable. Sam and Dean, hardened bastards that they were, did not let the kicked dog look affect them, and Dean’s snort diverted the narrow-eyed Angel of the Lord look that tried to follow. Finally Cas gave up and was grumpy for a few days, at which point, neither Winchester having dropped dead or disappeared, he started to relax fractionally.

 

_Eight days before things went sideways..._

 

A lot of research, head scratching and phone calls had still not turned up any leads on Kevin’s location - or Garth’s either. Yeah, Cas had remembered another wrinkle in Naomi’s Fuck Everyone Over plan. According to her, Garth was off the reservation. Dean and Sam refused to believe it on Naomi’s say-so alone. Nonetheless, inquiries needed to be made.

But now a hunt had popped up on the radar and that took priority (the ants in Dean’s pants had nothing to do with that assessment.)

Dean swung his duffel into the trunk, tunelessly singing the final part of Seek and Destroy’s chorus to himself on a loop. His step had bounce, his baby was clean and newly oiled, and about to burst right out of the garage on her own if they didn’t get going soon. 

“Come on, ladies! It’s now or never!” Dean shouted, mind already on route planning and supplies status (might stop in Louisville and buy another few kays of salt).

He slipped into the driver’s seat, keyed the garage control, light flooding in and the open road beyond, oh yeah.

Sam leaned over so he could wave at Dean through the windshield. “Take care. Call me when you get there,” he said loudly enough to be heard inside the car and then walked right back into the bunker. 

Dean’s jaw dropped.

Then he turned his head and stared at Cas who had appeared in the passenger seat.

“Uh...”

Cas looked away from the open garage door towards Dean. He stared at Dean. Dean stared back. Eventually Cas’s gaze fished around the space he occupied as if to figure out what Dean was finding so involving. Then with a deliberate gesture, Cas reached over his shoulder, pulled his seatbelt over his chest and clicked it in place. Then he looked back at Dean expectantly.

“Er. Okay.” 

The thing was, Dean wasn’t more than, oh, 90% surprised. Had this been discussed at any point...? Dean was normally all over strategy planning, he only tuned out when seals and Enochian rituals and multispatial binding was mentioned. He was damn sure that if there’d been plans to leave Sam behind, he would know about it - yet there was still that small part of him that did not feel surprised, ganging up with Cas and Sam’s obvious coordination on this to make him feel like this was completely planned for and he’d been the one not paying attention.

The Impala’s motor roared to life and Dean drove off instead of going back inside and asking Sam what the hell. He knew what his brother would say, what Cas would say if Dean asked him instead. Sam needed to stay behind and run the search for their friends, as well as handle phones and lore and research. It made sense. That wasn’t at all what was going on, of course, but that was the full-of-sense answer Dean would get if he asked, so he wasn’t going to bother. 

He knew what was up without having to ask. The knowledge made his hands clench on the steering wheel, made him cut off slow-poke farmers and idiots on the interstate. He knew damn well what the deal was, even if everybody would deny it. This was a thin wedge that was being inserted into Dean’s life, into his _family_ , and it was going to rip a huge part of Dean’s life away. _Again_. 

Counter-intuitively, this was exactly why Dean had started the motor and driven away. He’d...not reacted well in the past when he’d felt the fabric of his life fray like this. He’d clung too hard when he should have been a big enough guy to let go and forge on alone. The last few months had been shit for a lot of reasons for Dean, but they’d not blinded him to what Sam was going through. He just hadn’t known what to do about it and so was just hoping for the best.

Maybe that’s what this was. The best.

Cas let him drive in moody silence until they passed the Missouri state line sign, then he started talking about materialization and metaphysical weight effects. Dean had to remember what the hell that was about. They’d talked about this their first night together, how Cas was going to entertain them with information about why he could apparently change his mass at a whim. It was meant to entertain _both_ brothers. Sam _and_ Dean...Dean listened in stony silence for a few minutes until he caught himself.

_Yeah. What a great catch I am. Cas is helping Sam in a way I wasn’t able to and now I’m resenting him for it. Great going, Winchester._

Dean shook himself and made an effort to listen to whatever it was Cas was trying to explain. He didn’t get it any more than before, but the black mood that’d grabbed him lifted slowly. Because...he wasn’t alone, he had Cas at his side, and that was already something. That was already a _lot_ , and Life had taught Dean Winchester not to get too greedy.

Anyway, maybe this wasn’t permanent. Maybe Sammy just needed a vacation from hunting. Hey, maybe he was letting them have a honeymoon! 

 

 

Still behind the wheel, Dean ate the sandwiches Sam had thoughtfully prepared, flicking salad leaves through the window to decorate the interstate. After nine pm he stopped at the first motel with an attached diner and vacancies that didn’t look like a complete roach pit. 

Cas went invisible - because that was a thing he could do - while Dean got a single for the night. Cas hadn’t understood why Dean had asked him to go Casper. But he went along with Dean’s request without forcing Dean to explain that two men getting a single bed in a small burg in southern Illinois could potentially lead to complications even in this day and age. Dean could handle sneers and jeers thrown his way, but if someone keyed his car or put sugar in the tank, Dean would have to hurt a bunch of humans (he supposed they qualified on a technicality), and that was not what they were supposed to be hunting on this trip. 

Dean brushed his teeth, washed his face, contemplated a shower but was repelled by the smell of mildew. The bunker had made him soft, way too used to his little comforts; John would not have approved.

He exited the bathroom and oh look. _Not_ a honeymoon.

Cas was sitting fully dressed on the bed up against the headboard, angel blade in hand, line of salt at the entrance and windows, wards glowing faintly on the motel wallpaper. He was staring at the door. 

As Dean’s steps trailed to a halt, Castiel lifted an arm and waved him forward without even looking his way. This wasn’t the Cas Dean led around by the hand and pushed gently into bed. This was the other one. 

Dean slipped between the covers. It was a bit early, but what the hell, this time he’d not go back to sleep when Cas stared him awake at five or whatever, they’d just hit the road.

It was obvious no sex was happening tonight. Okay. Not ‘okay’ okay, just, well, that was the way it was gonna go. Even though there’d have been something exciting about fucking around in a motel room. Just from the contrast between what Dean now had, compared to all those hookups in motels across the US of A before, the ones with gals or guys who thought he was just about any kind of regular joe under the sun. People who didn’t know him. People who were the exact opposite of the angel of the lord who knew him down to the ground, down to the dirty ashy corners of his soul and still loved him...Dean would have liked to flirt with that, to see Cas gasp in the uncertain light of a dirty lampshade, fingers gripping a cheap bedcover, spilling over- but it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight at any rate.

Cas reached over, touched Dean’s shoulder- Dean found himself in the middle of the bed rather than on his half, his nose five inches from Cas’s leg. Cas’s hand settled warm on his arm, right where his hand-print had once been.

Cas was still staring at the door.

“You ever going to be able to relax one day?” Dean asked after five minutes of turning the question around in his head and not finding a better way to ask.

“Perhaps,” was what Cas answered after a pause.

Interpretation: still working through some issues there, but hopefully he was actually _working_ on them and not treading water. He’d eased off a bit. That was already good. 

“Cas...once we get to Kentucky, you realize this is going to be a hunt.”

“Yes.”

“That means taking risks.”

Cas didn’t stir. “Yes. Your hunts usually entail that.” Was there an extra ounce of weight to that? Some steely resignation?

“Yeah, but you see-”

“I’ll let you operate. I remember that one time I tried to become a hunter. I know the help I can offer is limited.”

“Nah, buddy, you can help. You can interrogate a cat again.”

“We do not know if any animals are involved in this incident.”

“...Right.” Note to self, don’t try to kid with a tense angel. 

“I have to be careful in any intervention I make,” Cas said in a voice that sounded dead serious and rather dark. “We need to stay beneath the notice of the Host.”

Dean hunched to look up and grunt an interrogation. 

“I’ve not heard from Naomi. I don’t know what she’s planning. If anything. But we should be cautious.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Dean muttered, lifting an arm to point a finger at the angel blade on Cas’s other side.

From this angle, Cas’s frown looked even more scrunchy than usual. “More than that. We cannot give them any excuse to bring me in. Open manifestations of celestial power would give the hardliners a reason to intervene.”

“So no miracles on the eight o’clock news.”

“Or at any time.”

Dean shrugged and let his head fall back into the pillow. “Sam and I are old hands at staying under the radar - because the holy brigade might try to smite us, but the feds will put out APBs and roadblocks and that’d be a real pain in the ass. And they’ll be looking for mundane crap that’s a whole lot less obvious than making Jesus show up in a jet contrail.” Dean let his hand trail on the hard hip beneath the business suit pants. “We’ll figure it out. Always have. Just follow my lead.”

Cas didn’t answer, but Dean felt sure he’d nodded. In a way that did not involve removing his eyes from the door.

Dean fell asleep with Cas’s hand still warm on his arm and feeling like he was in a fucking bank vault, he was so thoroughly - almost embarrassingly - safe. But he took it like a man, and managed not to point out to his guardian angel that he could actually still fight and all, and didn’t require a nanny. This was important to Cas, he needed this, and it wasn’t that big a deal to give it to him.

 

_Seven days..._

 

Campbellsville, KY was in the middle of a shitstorm when the hunters arrived around noon. Four people had gone stark raving mad in a matter of months, which was ‘business as usual’ for Winchesters, but had unfortunately caught the local news networks on a slow summer cycle. The media were blaming lead in the pipes. The water company was blaming some unknown pathogen and the CDC. The CDC was blaming mass hysteria and the media.

“It’s called a circle jerk,” Dean explained, tossing down the paper and rubbing his eyes. 

Cas leaned forward over the diner table, getting his tie in the coffee Dean had made him order to avoid standing out. “Is that what is causing the madness in the victims?” 

“It’s about to cause mine at any rate. It’s going to be extra hard to get people to talk now.” Dean waved down the waitress. “Can I have the special please?”

“Sure thing, sugar. And for you, hon?”

Cas gave the - fairly good-looking for a 24/7 diner - waitress a blank look.

“He’s on a diet,” Dean said, picking up the paper again.

“Aww, you don’t need it, hon. The baby backs are ten percent off today.”

She winked at Cas, who gave her a penetrating stare in return as if about to ask her which babies she meant and if cannibalism was linked to the madness running rampant through the town. 

“We’re okay, thanks. More coffee, please.” Dean found Cas’s foot under the table and gave it a nudge, which got the attention back on himself. 

“Coming right up. Would you like some pie with that, hon?” Every time she called Cas hon with that easy finger-lickin’-good smile on her face, she was losing a few pennies off her tip. ”We make a good apple pie. It’s got fruit in it so it won’t be bad for your diet. It’ll boost that blood sugar.”

“Yeah, he’ll have a slice of that,” Dean said to get rid of her. 

Dean ate the pie and then they started making the rounds.

 

 

All four vics were male, the press had gotten that far. After the usual legwork, Dean figured out that they were all roughly in the same demographic, too: twenty to forty and with an eye out for the ladies .They’d been found completely incoherent and acting bananas - Dean’s interpretation of the more technical description from the clinical intake reports. The first had been trying to stuff his three hundred pounds down a two feet in diameter storm drain. Number two’s sister had found him in her yard banging his head against the concrete skirting of her patio (he was the one still in the hospital and not in the nut-house in Louisville). Number three had stolen a jackhammer out of a construction site and was digging through the floor of his basement at three in the morning when his wife called the cops. Number four had been in jail for a rather unpleasant set of crimes and had been hurling himself off the top bunk - formerly occupied by a fellow convict he had first strangled. All fun and games, fun and games. 

Dean didn’t like change, so he wasn’t happy to not have Sammy there with them. Which meant he wasn’t graceful enough to acknowledge it’d have taken them a bit longer to figure out this heap of crazy if Sam hadn’t been in the bunker with Bobby-levels of lore at his fingertips and a map of the city’s waterworks on his laptop.

“A...say that again?” Dean asked. 

“A Rusalka.”

“Rusalka.” Dean made interrogative eyebrows at Cas who looked at him blankly - either because he didn’t know what a Rusalka was either or because he was wondering if Dean had a problem with his eyes.

“It’s a type of ghost. A little bit of a woman in white situation, blended with drowning and a teen pregnancy PSA. I’ll email you the details.”

“Awesome,” Dean muttered, already feeling like he was not going to like this one. “But didn’t you say they drown their victims?”

“Normally yes. And there’s been a rash of drownings in the past ten years, transients, fishermen, truckers - the ones I could verify were all guys who liked to chase skirt a bit too much. Good thing you just switched teams, hm?”

“Bite me.”

“This woman was drowned in the local marsh. But you see, they recently changed a waterway for agriculture, a lot of the marsh dried up, the rest was concreted over and the spill-off encouraged to go through the storm drains.”

“Concrete. I suddenly get the guys trying to bash through floors.”

“You got it. They’re trying to join the Rusalka, and they can’t. So instead of drowning and decomposing alongside her, they end up going nuts instead. Not sure if that’s a trade-up or not. They might get better once the spirit is ganked.”

“Got me bones to burn?”

“Got you bones to burn.”

“And I got a notepad. Hit me.”

Turned out it was a good thing Cas was there. He couldn’t quiz the cat this time, but he could handle a shovel. And torch things without the help of lighter fluid. 

 

_Four days before Life caught up..._

 

Dean dumped the dirty laundry into the washer and hit the cycle. Then he went to put away his artillery. Through the arch he could see Cas sitting next to Sam. They were geeking out over some research Sam had found in the file room. Like a couple of teenage girls over a heartthrob in a magazine, Dean thought with an inner snort of laughter. 

Cas the soldier had taken a step back the minute the bunker door had closed behind them. Sitting over there, looking at a bunch of notes with an air of approval, was Sam’s geeky brother and Dean’s, ah, not-brother-because-that-would-be-weird.

Which meant nightly activities could now resume. Dean glanced at his watch and wished he could travel in time to four hours in the future.

 

 

He’d gotten his angel naked and yeah, still not tired of that. Now- oh yeah, they were on chapter 5 of the Sex with Angels book, if he wasn’t mistaken. 

“Up for something different?” he whispered in Cas’s ear. 

“What?” Cas asked at normal volume - a ‘what were you thinking of’ rather than a ‘what are you trying to say, human?’

“How about we suck each other off tonight.” Dean slipped a thumb into Cas’s mouth suggestively when the lips opened, because it was hella sexy and would derail the inevitable, ‘oh, mutual fellatio’ that he _knew_ was coming (knew his angel by now).

Cas moved back to get his mouth away from Dean’s hand, and said “Alright,” with a small private smile rather than “No” or anything cringe-worthy.

Three minutes later Dean had a head of messy black hair in his lap and everything was back to grade A fucking awesome. Cas imitated what Dean had done to him a few times already down to the letter, but that was okay because Dean was apparently an excellent teacher. 

Dean returned the favor on his knees with his angel up against the wall, because he felt like it. Because...because there was something extremely _dirty_ about this, something that looked like it shouldn’t come near Dean, but this was Cas and, well, somehow that made it go from _completely not okay_ to _completely fucking hot_. It was fortunate Dean was not into introspection or he’d 1- not be able to do it and 2- would probably give himself an aneurysm. Instead, he gave his angel a blowjob that had Cas accidentally clonking his head against the plaster some old Men of Letters dry-waller had put in ages ago, and by the end of it Dean was hard again. So he went back to what was probably Chapter 2 in the Sex with Angels book - one they’d skipped since they’d jumped straight onto the advanced reading section - and taught Cas about handjobs. 

Oddly enough, Cas was awkward at that, even though he’d gone down on Dean like a champ earlier. But that very awkwardness - and the fact that Dean had to cover Cas’s hands with his own and _show_ him- 

 

_Three days..._

Dean finally remembered to buy a bunch of cheap hand towels at the local Dollar and Dime during their weekly supply run, to keep in his bedside table so he didn’t have to wash his sheets every bloody day. 

 

_Two days. One._

Everything was awesome. 

\---

Two weeks after Dean had dragged his angel to bed, Sam’s cell phone rang right after breakfast. The caller ID showed up as 666.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay! Crowley! I love Crowley. You can always count on him to screw things up for the Winchesters in new and creative ways .


	3. And Then Crowley Happened

“Great, he’s late,” grumbled Sam, glancing at this watch.

“Maybe someone ganked him,” Dean said hopefully.

“Not with our luck. Or rather, with our luck it was Abaddon who got him, and she’s the one who’ll show up for this skeevy rendez-vous.”

“Skeevy? What’s so skeevy about a parking garage?” Crowley asked right behind Sam, making the hunter jump and pull his angel blade out of its concealed scabbard. “Some of my best plotting has been done in parking garages, I’ll have you know.”

“We rest our case,” Dean muttered, giving the darkened sub-level of this Salina parkade a dour look. “Come on, Deep Throat, what do you want.”

“Assistance. Of the brutal variety. You can see why I immediately thought of you.” 

“Hmf.”

“And I see I am fortunate to have the help of all three Winchesters.”

“This one and unique time, yeah,” Dean confirmed. It went without saying that they would present Crowley with a united front. Crowley did not need to know about the raging argument in the car all the way over here. Cas had spent the entire trip arguing against Sam and Dean’s involvement, pointing out that it was _his_ debt to repay. The Winchesters had told him to stuff it, with more or less eloquence depending on which brother was doing the talking. They’d all benefited from Crowley’s help against Naomi by knock-on effect, and no way no how was Cas toddling off to meet the King of Hell on his own. 

“Good, good, we’ll be the four musketeers then,” Crowley said with a rich smile. His eyes seemed to linger first on Castiel, then on Dean. “Here’s the situation. Abaddon is hopelessly outclassed when it comes to running a presidential campaign in the Pit. Things are going well on my side. But I have a pest problem. Spies, to be specific.” 

Dean snorted. “You’re surprised? I don’t know a single demon who wouldn’t be working all sides of your conflict, including sides you didn’t even know existed.” 

“Well said.” Crowley nodded regally as if giving Dean a pat on the head. “I do know my demons, however, and I know how to make them more scared of me than of Abaddon. But every campaign will have its undercover agents. I have two transactions going down in about an hour on two sides of the country. They are very important transactions. A large number of souls on the line.”

Dean’s lips pinched. But he had to focus. Abaddon was no joke, and as a demon, she was hard to find unless she was attacking them. If they could weaken her with Crowley’s help, good. If they could weaken her and find a way to screw up Crowley’s deal and free a lot of people from eternal damnation, even better.

“Abaddon has a strike force, some hand picked toughs she’ll undoubtedly send to trip me up,” Crowley continued. “Which location she’s heard about and sends them to will give me a lot of information on who is telling tales out of church. So to speak. Am I making myself clear? I can use smaller words if need be. Diagrams too.”

“Just get on with it,” Dean bit out. “Why do you need us?”

“Because not only do I want to find out who is spying on me, I want to take out Abaddon’s strike force. What can I say, I’m a multitasker.” 

“That’s why you need us,” said Cas. “You can’t move any of your forces around without spies warning Abaddon this is a trap. There is nobody down there you can trust.”

“Huh. Same Pit as always,” Dean muttered.

“Not quite true, of course, but I would rather not take chances. And since I have a marker with an angel who can take down demons with ease...and give Abaddon _and_ her followers something to pause and think about...”

Dean shifted against the Impala, wondering what other aspects of his plan Crowley had that he had not informed them of. Abaddon was virtually invulnerable, a rabid wolverine with a kill-first attitude, so it was easy to focus on her. Crowley looked like a banker and talked like a prig. It was easy to overlook him. The thing was, he might not be too tough but he was smart, and maybe they’d be better off with the kill-crazy hell tramp after all...

“Fine. but there’s two locations. How we going to cover that?”

“Ah, yes, that’s math, isn’t it. You see, four divided by two is -“

“No,” Cas snapped immediately.

“I’m not saying we have to attack two by two,” Crowley said as if he’d expected that. ”Here’s what I suggest. You take your boyfriend and I’ll hang out with Moose-“

“Fuck no,” Dean shot back just as quickly

Sam made a non-starter noise of protest to Dean’s objection before remembering the united front deal. 

“This puts the two humans on both spots, humans who can pray considerably faster than I can use a cell phone. Whichever location is attacked, Feathers, you arrive, you smite, we’re home in time for toasted crumpets. And if Abaddon herself shows up, then the boys fall back and you and I can have a shot at her. Wouldn’t you rather have the drop on her than the other way around?”

 

\---

 

Thirty minutes and a lot of arguing later, Dean was in position in Meridian of all places. 

It was wrong to split up like this. He knew it was wrong. He kept telling himself it was wrong and yet they had all agreed to it in the end. Crowley was the current King of Hell, but above all he was a bloody good salesman.

Sam and Cas were somewhere in Texas, at the other potential go spot. Together. Sam was one of the best hunters of his generation, but it was a fact that Dean was arguably just that bit better. More to the point, he'd be dead, damned and demonized before he let his kid brother take a risk without celestial backup at hand. So Dean was the one stuck in Idaho with Crowley. Lucky him. 

“I don’t even want to know why you’re making deals up here.”

“Have you ever visited this part of the world? There’s so little to do that selling your soul for an evening out on the town seems like a good idea soon.”

“Hmf.”

Silence for a couple of minutes, surprisingly. Dean settled down with a pair of binoculars. The meeting was in a quasi-abandoned outskirt of town, under the concrete pillars of an unfinished highway belt. It’d been used as a dumping ground for trash since before the California gold rush, Dean was ready to bet. The meeting between the demonic sales team on the one hand and a soon-to-be coven of witches on the other was going to happen on the concrete apron of a distant off ramp, next to a construction site. One of the enterprising humans had drawn a large pentacle and laid out a brazier and supplies for the final sacrament when the deal when through, but so far nobody had arrived for the final negotiations. The surroundings were what happened to ‘desolate’ after it went on an all-night bender, but it did give Dean good cover. He was fifty yards away, up an incline, sitting on a truck’s rubber tire and his elbows resting on a three-legged wooden desk, it’s ‘70s formica split and grimy. It was half past eleven in the morning here, an hour behind Kansas, but the summer day was pleasantly warm, the garbage was mostly of the large metallic kind and didn’t stink too much, and Crowley had been quiet since Cas had dropped Dean off here a few minutes ago. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

“So you finally caught him, hmm? Congratulations.”

Then again, Dean had been known to be wrong before.

“Not interested in talking.” If he didn’t engage, he wouldn’t end up fighting his temporary ally.

“Oh please, don’t pretend you weren’t hoping I’d notice that smug look on your face and the feathers on your lapel.”

Dean’s fingers tightened on the binoculars. He wasn’t going to give Crowley the satisfaction of losing his temper or confirming anything.

“I was wondering if you two would ever get over your shy, virginal fumblings and pass the hand-holding stage. Was it good? Did he cry?”

“Crowley, can you shut up?”

“Oh I’m sorry, did _you_ cry?”

“You’re going to distract us. Isn’t this deal important?”

Crowley - making no effort to hide - stood next to Dean and leaned a hip against the desk’s edge, his back to the scene. “My boys haven’t even shown up yet, we have another twenty minutes to wait.”

“Stop talking about me and anyone I have ever known, and you might live long enough to see your guys arrive.”

“Hah, touched a nerve there. You’re very protective of your little slice of Heaven.”

“What’s wrong, Crowley, jealous?” Dean couldn’t help but shoot back.

“No, sorry, I don’t like him that much, you can have him.”

Dean snorted, binoculars swinging towards the further edge of the construction site. Demons would presumably poof into place, but the witches were going to arrive with wheels, and that over there was the only place to park. Nobody yet.

“I mean, I’ve never been into- what would you call it? Muppet sex?”

“What?!” Dean exclaimed, startled out of his resolution not to engage by the completely out of left field remark.

“You know, those guys who get their jollies by shagging hand puppets. Oh don’t look at me like that, we’re both men of the world and alumni of an entire Pit full of moral degenerates.”

“Hand puppets? What the hell are you on about?” 

“Well yes. That’s what his body is to him. Right?”

Dean scoffed and brought his attention back to his binoculars. Nothing moved below. The sun wasn’t visible from beneath their hunting bluff under the half-built highway. A cloud must have passed overhead though, as the air suddenly felt colder. 

“He’s not like a demon, you know,” Crowley mused, looking down and patting the buttons of his black coat. “See, we used to be human, we _know_ these bodies we slip into, we know how they work, and we fit into them just right. Castiel has never been human, hell, he’s spent almost all of his billion years of existence without a physical body at all. He’s...” Crowley looked vaguely at a pigeon that had settled on some metal struts nearby, poking out of poured concrete, and shrugged. “Well for starters he’s not even a he, right? Technically he’s an it.” 

“No he’s not,” Dean said in knee-jerk reaction.

“Yes it is.”

“Crowley-“ don’t engage, don’t engage- “Angels ride bodies like demons do, and they -“ no, that was not at all the comparison Dean wanted. “You don’t know jack. Cas told me our species nearly got wiped out by the Nephilim getting squeezed out all over the place by angels getting their rocks on with early humans.”

“A very biblical way of putting it. Though if you’d read some of the apocrypha more closely- you know what? Never mind.” 

....don’t engage, don’t- “What?”

“I don’t want to be a buzzkill. Have those idiots arrived yet?” Crowley said, turning back towards the construction site, hands stuffed in the pocket of his expensive black coat.

“No.”

“If they’re late, they will not be so for the next appointment I’ll arrange for them,” Crowley said thoughtfully. A nearby cat, thin and probably feral, was rooting through garbage a few yards away; glass and tin cans clinked like sets of manacles in a torture chamber.

Silence for a few seconds.

“...What-“ _Shit Dean don’t engage!_ “...What did you mean about the nephilim?”

“You’re asking a _demon_ for information on the bible?” Crowley asked with a snort. “Really?”

“No.”

“Well it’s from a lot of old texts, not the King James,” Crowley continued in a pedantic manner. “And there’s a lot of squabbles regarding translations. Some people think it was the fallen angels who put their hands up the primitive ladies’ fur skirts, but I know that’s bollocks because that’s my team. From what I heard - from those who were actually there, which always makes history more interesting - it was the lower order angels who got their kink on. The ones who were the least disciplined, who could most easily fall for the ‘temptations of the flesh’.” Crowley’s amused leer easily fit in a pair of quotes around the words. ”The more powerful harp-strummers were too busy with the war on evil - and couldn’t fit into early man anyway without a nasty meaty explosion. Fun fact: it’s the remnants of Nephilim through some human bloodlines that allow angels to posses certain people. The more Nephilim left in there - fractions, mind you - the bigger the angel that can fit in. Plus there are affinities to certain lineages and such. That’s why archangels are so restricted in their choice of meat-suits. That’s what I understand, but obviously I’m no expert. Demons don’t have to be so picky.” 

The cat dug some more, then froze, looked up, and dashed away so fast it almost qualified as teleportation. 

Dean let his fingertips rest on the demon killing knife’s hilt in its scabbard sown into his jacket. He and Crowley were silent and watchful for a minute, examining the piles of garbage around them, but nothing moved, just a few flies and a dapple of sunlight over where the overhead pass finished, sun dancing through briefly in a split of the clouds.

“I mean, that’s got to be a bit of a relief, right?” Crowley said finally, turning his attention back towards their target.

“...Uh?”

“That your current heavenly fling was too busy fighting the early demons like Lillith and her ilk to leave a bun in some bird’s oven. Hah! You and Moose are archangel candidates, right? You could have been Castiel’s grandsons many times removed for all you know.”

Dean’s binoculars swept the concrete apron for the appearance of any demon he could kill - no, protect. Wait. He was stuck here to stop the ambush of a bunch of demons by another bunch of demons. Christ...

“Some grab bag of centuries later, mind you. I think even the most nutty genealogist would no longer consider that incest.” There was a rich curl to Crowley’s tone that added, ‘unless that turns you on.’

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. Human civilization had risen from virtual monkey-hood in that time. And it was barely a fraction of Castiel’s existence. A blink, a sigh.

“But that’s not the case, as I said. If nothing else, our Castiel is a bit too, ah, disciplined for the easy flings. The hanky-panky. It’s only certain angels who’d even stoop to that when given a vessel.”

Memory of what Anna and everyone had told him - angels don’t have sex. And Cas’s objection to that? Balthazar, of all people. Even Cas had called him a special case. 

“Even if he wasn’t a Seraph back then, he could not have ridden one of those early men anyway. Hell, even now it must not be easy. Poor critter must be like a contortionist to get even the greatest part of that power and arcane mass into a lil’ itty bitty body.” 

Like a distant echo from one of the many parts of his life Dean did not like to remember, he heard Cas mention that his real form was the size of the Chrysler building.

Don’t engage- no, don’t even listen. Don’t even _think_.

Crowley hummed, then shook himself. “So sorry, I was just thinking ‘flexible’ and my mind went somewhere inappropriate. You must have some real interesting headboard banging sessions I’d wager. He probably doesn’t get quite as much out of it, being a sexless creature of energy and divine grace, but as long as you have fun, I’m sure he’s glad to help you get your jollies. I mean, stamina and all, right? And of course he can also do the demon thing.”

“The demon...”

“Jump bodies! Oh come on, the one advantage of going incorporeal for your hookups is that he can be Bob one day and Betty the next,” Crowley said, leaning over to plonk an elbow a foot away from the binoculars and leaning towards Dean. “Has he tried finding a lady to drive, just to give you a change of pace? Ah, right, angels need permission. But there’s scores of religious types out there, he could find a cute one and show up as a she one day. Just for awhile, so he doesn’t burn out her batteries. But maybe he’s not that inventive in bed,” Crowley added with a faint disappointed sigh as if he actually had a stake in the matter, his tone almost pitying. “Probably not, got no instincts there.”

“He does-” Don’t talk!

“He does? Really?” Crowley sounded suddenly alive with renewed interest. “Amazing. Still waters indeed. Well well well, I am seeing a whole new side to our tight-laced angel. He must have been watching humans for awhile now.”

Or just watching Dean...

“Well if he’s willing to push the envelope, then you’re in with a chance. Want me to float the body swap suggestion to him? Might sound better coming from me than from you-“

“Crowley.”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

“And stay out of your sex life, huh?”

“Just...shut up.”

And then thank god Dean’s cell phone rang, Sam on the caller ID. 

“Go time?” Dean asked tightly. It was almost noon.

“No. Anything on your end?”

“No-“

“Just discussing Dean’s sex life!” Crowley crowed.

In one smooth move Dean drew the demon killing knife and drove it halfway up to the hilt into the wood near Crowley’s elbow.

Crowley made a garbled noise, then huffed. “Very well. Prude.”

“Dean?” Sam sounded cautious.

“Yeah?”

“Did Crowley mention sex-“

“Why are you calling?” Dean asked tightly.

“Just checking on you.”

Dean bared his teeth. “If there’d been a hit here I’d have called. Or prayed.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Sam softly with the faintest stress on ‘I’.

“So why are you bothering me?!”

“Um-“

“For Pete’s sake, Moose is calling because your boyfriend is worried, I’m not even on the line and I can tell that much,” Crowley sneered from the prudent distance of fifteen feet to which he’d removed himself.

Dean jerked the knife out of the wood, flipped it one-handed and caught it in a throwing hold.

Crowley took the hint and vamoosed, hopefully to walk the perimeter

Dean took a deep breath.

“...Dean, is everything okay?”

“Fine. Crowley is being-…Crowley. Nothing I can’t handle. Keep an eye open and tell Cas to stop worrying so much.”

“Don’t let the bitch mess with you.”

Dean just snorted and hung up.

He lifted the binoculars. Examined the construction site’s entrance and parking lot again. A car had driven past the road earlier, but had kept driving straight on rather than turn towards the rendezvous point. Dean glanced at his watch. Kept the blade near his hand.

Words beating around his head like the knells of a mourning bell.

There were Crowley’s words of course. _-he probably doesn’t get that much out of it - sure he’s glad to help you get your jollies-..._

And there were also his own words a few years back - _Aren’t you all ken dolls? Smooth down there? Uriel’s dismissive look in response. Mud monkey._

Rising above it all was that toxic inner voice that could unload those cold hard truths he usually buried under booze and self-delusions. His own voice that knew just what a needy asshole he could be, the kind of guy who couldn’t stand on his own without a daddy or a brother or an angel to care for and cling to.

_Crowley is a dick but he has it nailed._

No, Dean told himself. He’s just trying to fuck with my head.

_That’s a given_ , Dean reflected coldly. _But that doesn’t mean he isn’t right and I know it. On some level I’ve known it all along. It’s the very first thing I told Cas: he was talking about feelings and I was talking about sex and we were never on the same page. Not with this._

...That’s not true, Dean thought, his throat suddenly aching. Yeah, I don’t think he really knew what was going on that first time, but afterwards he said he understood why sex was so great. 

_No,_ Dean countered, slow and sure as a trigger pulled on an execution. _What he said exactly was, I understand why MORTALS are so obsessed with sex._

The binoculars creaked in Dean’s fingers. The casing threatened to crack.

Cas likes touching-

_That’d be because he just got out of fucking solitary. He’s contact-deprived. I’ve been seeing all this time how much it did his head in._

He said he _wanted_ to have sex with me.

_No, he said he’d be okay with it. Right after admitting that the thought had never crossed his mind until I said I was interested. That’s what it comes down to. He does not, he has never and he never will want a piece of this ass. I’m the one with the desire. He’s merely putting up with it._

He is into it!

_Yeah. Because I am. He loves me, dumb fuck that I am, and on some level I knew he didn’t know what he was doing and I took that anyway. From the start I noticed how I can’t get a bead on his body language, how he only seems to react, he never reaches out unless I do something first. I happily put it down to his being new at this, but he’s not tried the very first thing to explore his own sexuality even now. Because he doesn’t have any to begin with._

That’s not true! He has been trying stuff-

_When I suggest it. And only by imitation. That blow job. Blow for blow what I did to him the first time. Exactly. Down to those little pauses to come up for air._

Oh god.

_Yeah. That’s right. ‘Come up for air’? Cas doesn’t need to breathe._

But he doesn’t hate it. He would tell me, he promised-

_No. He has no interest in me physically, he’s probably bored half the time, entertains himself by watching the monkey get his freak on, but yeah, he doesn’t actually hate it. He loves me. So he’ll let me use his vessel like a fleshlight to make me happy. Am I lucky or what? Go me! When I get back, I should buy myself a cigar._

“Yeah,” said Dean out loud, glancing at his watch again. “That’s enough of that.”

Cas did love him. Dean knew that down to his very bones, had known it on some level from the start, since before Castiel even Fell for him. Maybe it’d started out with a hell rescue, a hand-print burn and a bond, but it’d tumbled into something a whole lot more solid and true, something that made their world turn and that’d survived an insane amount of crap and mistakes. Sex or no, Cas needed him. That was not in question and never had been. Which was why Dean was not going die in this rat hole. Especially not tripped up by his own stupid issues.

More negative thoughts tried to coil around the back of his brain. He doused them in gasoline and flicked a mental match. Then he got the sawed-off loaded with salt rounds out of his duffel, drew his knife and stepped behind a nearby abandoned fridge.

It was past noon and things were about to get fucked. 

Crowley appeared.

“My boys didn’t show,” he said softly, almost mildly, and he wasn’t trying to put nails in Dean’s head, that was how bad things were.

“Yeah,” Dean said calmly. “Your trap’s been sprung and turned into another trap. Go and get your ass to Sam and Cas.”

“Huh? But you just said-“

“Bet you the bank they’re under attack too, and Abaddon will go where Cas is if she’s got enough high level mooks to give her the upper hand.” Dean looked around carefully - still no sign of anybody creeping up on them. 

“That’s not what I’d do, I’d attack the weakest link,” Crowley pointed out.

“That’s because you’re a coward,” Dean said flatly. “She’s not. Go-“

A click.

Dean dived and the gunshot aimed at him missed by over a foot, punching a hole in the fridge’s grimy siding. 

Dean rolled, got to his feet and fired nearly point blank into the guts of a black-eyed woman trying to bring a kaki-colored Springfield piece to bear. She doubled over the salt rounds in her stomach, screaming. Dean knifed her in the throat and moved on in less than a second, going low again to use the garbage as cover.

Somebody screamed off to the left, with that static crackle that signaled a demon dying from an angel blade. Dean’s flare of hope died as he spotted Crowley hefting the knife he’d stolen from some dead angel ages ago; he’d just tugged it out of the spine of some bastard armed with a rifle. Looked like Abaddon was still thinking unconventionally - for a demon - and arming her guys with stuff that had actual bite.

“Crowley!” Dean shouted, then dodged a spray of shots from somewhere off to his left.

“Have you prayed?!” Crowley shouted, looking around vainly for heavenly backup.

“I tell you they’re also under attack! Go help them!”

Dean ran forward, crouched low, knowing they’d be triangulating on his voice. He rounded an upturned spring mattress stinking of cat piss and worse, ran nearly bent in two past a rusted old snowblower with its guts ripped out, rounded a pile of garbage, and shot the demon advancing towards his previous position in the back. While the black-eyed bastard was writhing on the ground, Dean stabbed him through the chest, then kept on moving. 

“Crowley! Go!” His fingers found the spare cartridges he’d stuffed in his back pocket and reloaded on automatic. 

“That’d be stupid,” Crowley shouted - from twenty feet away, hiding behind a large concrete pillar. “Sam is with a _bloody angel-_ ”

“Go! I got this!”

“-and if you get your stupid arse ventilated on my watch, your Seraph is going to make everybody’s life hell on earth! Starting with mine!”

Dean opened his mouth- 

The spitting punch of automated fire made him hit the ground and roll sideways. Five feet away, between piles of metal and plastic garbage, earth spat up like tiny geysers. Under cover, Dean rolled his eyes, professional pride kicking in briefly. Abaddon could arm her fellas, but she hadn’t taught them to shoot all that well or coordinates a proper ambush. Losers.

Dean shot to his feet, threw himself to the right. Somebody else was coming from that direction, and he couldn’t take care of the automated weapon until he’d cleared his six. He rounded on the clown as they ran into each other behind the wreck of a beat-up old Chevy. Dean fired from the hip but the demon was already dodging, grabbing the barrel of the shotgun and aiming it away as Dean fired again. Dean quickly let go of the now unloaded shotgun before the mook could tug him into range with it, and hurled a punch instead.

The fucker was good, better than those others so far. Probably one of the better troops Abaddon had trained personally, a guy she’d have sent here to make sure Dean was dead while she personally took out the angel on the team. The demon caught Dean’s thrust with the knife, blocking Dean’s wrist with his forearm, while his finger tightened on the Glock he carried- Dean whaled into him, nutting him so hard the demon bonked back into the Chevy’s top. Dean chopped the hand carrying the gun. It would have broken a human’s thumb, but the only thing it did there was stop Dean from getting ventilated right this second. But that second was enough to get the knife into the bastard’s throat.

The shotgun was back in his hand, his fingers reloading it entirely of their own volition. Only two more rounds left after this, but that would probably be enough. The cold tally in Dean’s mind was a distant thing: no more movement, machine gun silenced, needed to check the bastard wasn’t coming around for a better shot...Inside his soul was screaming. The only two people that he loved still left on this wretched planet could be dying a thousand miles away. What was he doing here?!

Dean poked a prudent head over the Chevy’s top, looking for the automated gun wielder while shouting: “ _Crowley get the fuck over to-_ ”

Crowley was thirty feet away, standing over the body of the shooter, tilting his chin to a spot behind Dean.

“Dean!” 

They were both there, standing in a ray of sunshine. Sam and Cas. Unharmed. A bit too unharmed, Dean judged with the habit of much practice. No way his brother’s hair had been that neatly combed an hour ago, and Cas’s tie was done up and was nicely centered. That just shrieked ‘got hurt but got angel-healed back to mint condition’. Still, they were okay. Standing in the light from the broken overpass like they were standing in a halo.

Dean bent over and put his fists - still grasping his weapons - on his knees and breathed in properly for the first time in ten minutes now that the big bloody lump in his chest was gone.

Hands caught him and straightened him up.

“S’okay, I’m fine,” he said, but let Cas touch his forehead and whisk away a few cuts, the mess he’d made of his hand falling in garbage and broken glass while dodging earlier, the dust, the grime, the sweat.

“Abaddon?” Dean asked, hand on Cas’s arm and checking for injury - even though he knew that was both useless and stupid, but it wasn’t as if it was going to actually hurt anyone and instincts were instincts.

“She attacked our position, but it did not seem she was expecting me. She got away along with two of her troops when the tide turned against her. She-” Cas’s eyes went gun-metal hard as he looked past Dean. “Crowley.”

The King of hell stopped sauntering towards them and threw up both hands in their black gloves. “Now now, all plans have a failure probability-“

“You could have gotten Dean killed!”

“But instead I drew out some serious threats from Abaddon’s arsenal,” said Crowley, prudently staying at a distance. “These bad boys could have ambushed you anywhere, could have harmed your little baa-lambs.” 

Dean caught Cas by the elbow and held him back. “Hang on, Cas. Don’t kill him. He’s a piece of shit, but Abaddon is a bit worse by a narrow margin.

“I should put that on my campaign banners,” Crowley said brightly. 

“You’re mighty cheerful for a guy whose plan blew up in his face,” Sam said, eyes narrowed suspiciously as he came up beside Dean.

“What do you mean, Moose?”

“You planted information around to see which spy would pick it up and sell your guys to Abaddon. But all your men sold you out by the looks of it, and set you up instead. So you still don’t know if the guys you were testing were spies, all you know-“

“Is that some of my boys have been very bad boys,” said Crowley with a smirk. “You see, I had told them to expect an ambush and that I would help them out personally. They thought that meant I’d do it alone to avoid further attention. Not with backup they could not bribe or blackmail or even know about.”

A stunned moment of silence.

“You mean,” said Dean, surprised at his own calm, “that this was also a possible outcome. You were setting up the spies, but also potentially the goons who were supposed to meet here. They just didn’t know you had hunters and an angel in tow.”

“It is a wise ruler who plans for-“

“Changed my mind, Cas, blow him away,” said Dean, dropping his hand from the angel’s coat sleeve.

Unfortunately Crowley was already gone.

 

\---

 

Cas flew them back to the parkade. They crowded into the Impala, eyes on their six. Dean didn’t relax until they were out on the open road.

He drove for five minutes through the sunshine. Letting the adrenaline go, the hum of the motor take him down in stages. Every minute he’d glance over at Sam - doing pretty much the same thing, coming down from the high. They exchanged a look, but didn’t say anything. How many years had the Winchester brothers driven away from a deadly fight side by side, letting silence take over for awhile, just sitting together, appreciating the fact that the other was still there?

Cas was in the back seat, staring out the window with a dangerous narrow-eyed expression lurking behind the usual stolid facade. Dean suspected he wouldn’t say anything unless directly questioned until they got back to the bunker.

They hit a few stoplights, caught traffic on the overpass, but then it was out on highway 81 and smooth sailing. The light was streaming through the window, the same sunshine that had illuminated his brother and his lover under that bridge, and illuminated Dean’s little epiphany at the same time, an abrupt moment of clarity.

Dean had been brought up to not think and question, to do the job, to not worry about deep emotional shit. Though he’d outgrown his father’s regimental strictures by now, he was still a morass of tangled emotions, negative thinking, stubbornness and booze at the best of times. He didn’t get moments of clarity often, not positive ones at any rate. When he did, he’d learned not to take them for granted.

The first one he’d ever had? He remembered that one. Back during the apocalypse. After every single being up high and down below - and even their own damn father - told him he’d have to kill Sam, right away or in the Armageddon cage match. And Dean realized that, fuck no, maybe everything around his demon-ridden Lucy-vessel little brother Sammy was horrid, hurtful and complicated...but that they were stronger together than they were apart. That was what mattered. The rest of the shit...could just be dealt with.

So yeah. He’d been right - more exactly, the nasty part of Dean’s brain that ate through him like acid when he gave it half a chance, the part that had just been waiting for Crowley’s words like a pack of semtex waited for the fuse’s jolt. It was true, Dean hadn’t really thought it through when he’d dragged Cas to bed a few weeks back. He’d considered the ramification on their friendship, but he hadn’t stopped to think that he was screwing...well, an entirely different heavenly species which probably needed the word ‘quantum’ to even describe it, who were so Schroedinger - as Sam put it - that even their gender was uncertain until you plunked them into a vessel, and you were still dicing with physics at that point. He’d not thought about any of that.

Because all he’d been thinking about was grabbing onto the best friend and brother in arms who’d been driving him crazy for years in all kinds of ways. He’d just been thinking about Cas. Him and Cas and never letting go.

That was the important thing. The rest of the shit...could be dealt with.

Dean felt a burden slowly shift and roll off his shoulders. And it wasn’t only Crowley’s crap he’d been carrying; some of this weight dated from the moment Cas had first reached over and kissed him. Had Dean subconsciously felt something was off from the start? More likely it was just the knowledge, born of experience, that Life could never be so good to Dean Winchester. All along he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and if this was the only piece of leather to hit the floor...then he’d gotten off lightly This wasn’t so bad. Because after all the shit they’d been through, they knew each other (as Cas put it with odd meaningfulness sometimes), and that’d get them through a lot as long as Dean didn’t let fucking demons tie him into a knot and stuff his own head up his ass.

He turned abruptly off the interstate.

Sam looked up at the exit number in surprise and then glanced at Dean, but didn’t say anything.

Dean drove for a minute and pulled into the first exit he spotted, some farmer’s dirt road towards a cornfield. He stopped the car, turned, put his elbow up on the bench seat’s back and looked from Sam to Cas and back again. “So. There’ll be times we have to go off and fight our separate ways. But I say we don’t let bloody CrowleyKing of Hell tell us when that is. We stick together as much as we can from now on. We’re stronger that way. Got it?”

“That’s got my vote,” said Sam lazily, putting his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes.

Cas didn’t say anything, but he lost that dangerous narrow-eyed look and nodded. 

“Good. Now, we’re going to put on some tunes, chill, take the back roads, stop in that farmer’s market in Tipton and buy out their biggest pie.”

Sam snorted.

 

\---

 

Back in the bunker, it was that awkward time, 5pm, the dead zone of days. Sam looked at the clock, then at his pile of study material interrupted by the phone call this morning. Then he sighed.

“We need a plan,” Dean said.

His brother and Cas both turned towards him.

“The plan,” Dean announced, “is to stay up all night, eat popcorn and pie and drink beer while we watch every Die Hard movie ever made, even the crap ones. Cas hasn’t seen those yet. Then worry about Abaddon and demony fallout tomorrow when we wake up.” 

A knot seemed to unravel in his brother’s shoulders. “I can get behind that plan.”

“Cas? You okay with that?”

Cas looked up at the ceiling briefly - who knew what for - then nodded. “The bunker is safe. Our enemy will be regrouping. But unless Crowley determines Abaddon’s location, we can’t capitalize on that. What is a Die Hard movie?”

“Come, angel, let us worship at the temple of John McClane.”

”...I am not familiar with-“

“Be sure to make a lot of comments, that’s half the fun.”

“Yippee-ki-yay,” Sam snickered, probably just to see the look on Cas’s face. It was fun to befuddle an ancient celestial Being after a busy day. 

 

\---

Sam fell asleep partway through his fifth beer and ‘Live Free’, the lightweight. Dean, on the couch with an arm wrapped around Cas, watched to the end, both of them spontaneously shelving the ad-libs (for Dean) and the unintentionally hilarious questions (for Cas) when they heard the first faint snore from the easy chair. 

Dean let the credits roll, put all his hunting skills into rescuing Sam’s beer before it slipped from his loosening grasp, then motioned Cas out of the den. They made their way in the same companionable silence towards Dean’s room, Dean finishing his bro’s beer, waste not want not and all. 

Teeth brushed, t-shirt and sweats on for once, he dragged a still silent Cas to bed and curled up with him. Cas didn’t ask any questions, anymore than he questioned the previous nights when he’d ended up on that bed stripped naked with Dean’s hands all over him. Did he wonder at the change to what had almost become routine? Maybe he just thought it was late. Maybe his thoughts were something entirely different and Dean would need an acid trip and a third eye to follow them. 

Dean got his arm around Cas and the messy dark hair rested against his shoulder in what Dean had by now gotten into the habit of mentally dubbing ‘a manly dogpile’ rather than anything else, since neither of them were teenage girls. It helped him sleep, that was for sure. He wrapped his arm around Cas and felt a deep, deep sense of peace and happiness, even a weird satisfaction. Life had cheated Dean out of something it thought he coveted, but Dean had outsmarted Life by keeping what really mattered. 

Cas’s arms tightened around him gently. He’d explained that on close contact, some of Dean’s feelings echoed a bit, just the broadest outlines and uppermost thoughts, nothing detailed. Which was good, the details...were something they’d have to go over at one point, but not tonight. Not when the details were going to suck and probably piss them both off. The details didn’t matter in final. Apparently whatever Cas was picking up from Dean tonight was making him happy too if the way he tucked himself just a bit closer meant anything. 

Take that, Life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, first thing in the morning, Dean has a long heartfelt and involved conversation about his emotions, and hashes it all out with Cas in a mature and considered way.
> 
> If you believe that, then please get in touch with Crowley, he has this great timeshare opportunity on a bridge he'd like to discuss with you.


	4. The Non-Sexual Exploits of Dean Winchester

During the first week After Crowley, Dean expected Cas to ask the obvious question - so why are we no longer having sex? - every single day. 

Cas didn’t. 

Dean curled up with him every night - and slept better than at any time since he’d first gone hunting back with his dad. There was something about Cas being there, warm and present, but also awake and watchful, that just bypassed Dean’s usual inner alarm monitor and turned it right off. 

On Tuesday morning, out of curiosity, he asked Cas what he was looking at all night. Cas looked puzzled and answered, “You”. 

Dean said he could not imagine he was interesting enough to warrant even five minutes of staring.

Cas looked at him like he was being exceptionally thick, then his brow cleared and he said, “Ah. Humor.” 

Dean wasn’t sure what to do with that, so he let it rest.

The next day he dropped hints that if anything was bothering him, Cas should speak up. Cas immediately started talking about Abaddon and Crowley with a side of Naomi. 

Dean decided to stop worrying about it, stop wondering when Cas might or might not ask a question, what it meant - if anything - that he hadn’t yet. He had to remember that Cas was not human. Dean could not take anything for granted in his thought processes. Take it a day at a time. He’d have that conversation with Cas next week.

 

\---

 

Week Two was a hunt, which put anything sexual out of Dean’s mind for now. And that was fine, because there was nothing wrong with having rambling conversations or friendly silences with Cas on their way to Colorado to kill something. It felt _right_. Even without Sam...Dean missed his brother on these trips, damn did he miss him, but he’d figured out by now that Sam was trying to step back. So from now on it would mostly be him and Cas, and that wasn’t so bad either.

The only downside was that now Sam was buried in the bunker all the time. Dean was going to have to hoist him out of there sooner or later, for things other than hunting. Sammy needed to get out and meet people. Meet girls. Somebody had to get that new generation of legacies on the way. Had to beget a half dozen gangling tall kids growing up somewhere in Kansas, who would sneak out into the wood to meet Uncle Dean for shooting lessons and Uncle Cas for tutoring in protection spells so they would never have to worry about the things in the dark. 

 

\---

 

Week three saw them back at the bunker. 

Dean dragged Cas to bed early that night, ignoring Sam’s leer.

They had to talk about this now. 

He got Cas to ditch the coat, suit and tie, and undo the top three shirt buttons, just so it would a bit more...cozy? Dean didn’t know, he was coasting on instinct here. 

He sat up against the headboard and, still going on instinct, got Cas up against him and pulled the blanket over their legs. Like he had with Lisa on those long nights when he’d choked out a few details about the crap he carried around, or when she unloaded her worries about Ben not growing up knowing who his biological father was. 

Of course with a chick it was ten times easier, because you gave them half an opening and they were all on about their feelings at a hundred words a minute. Cas just curled up against him and was as quiet as a particularly restful cemetery, one that did not have the slightest hint of zombies or ghouls in it.

“Everything okay?” Dean finally hazarded, giving the wheels a kick

Cas nodded.

“Okay,” said Dean.

Five minutes later he flicked on his laptop on his bedside table and they watched Netflix before sliding down in the bed to sleep.

Next night, after a long bout of research and spitballing on the subject of Knights of Hell, Dean got the two of them back in the same position . It was close to midnight, but Dean suspected that when they did manage to have this talk, it was going to be considerably shorter than any he’d ever had with Lisa. 

Which just went to show that Dean Winchester was reliably wrong most of the time. Dean started off with a general - _very_ general - question about angels and vessels, and by three in the morning they had rambled over all kinds of weird or funny stuff about Heaven (for Cas) and Earth (for Dean) and stuff in between, past memories and future plans in regards to Sam, and hopefully Kevin too...Finally Dean was informed that it was time for him to sleep - the way he almost unhinged his jaw with his fourth huge yawn made that one a gimme. Just as he eased down against the pillow, he caught a smile on Cas’s face - an actual bloody smile, on Cas’s actual bloody face - that was...kind of warm and affectionate and - well, anyway, it was a smile. Dean felt himself flush. He coughed and went to sleep quickly with his usual angel blanket draped over half his body.

The third night went pretty much the same way. During a pause in their back and forth on all subjects that seemed to crop up (except the one that Dean had been expecting for over a week now), Dean tightened his arm around Cas’s shoulder. 

“So, uh, this okay? Just talking like this? You’re okay with this, right?”

“Yes,” Cas answered, and then added, “I like it.” 

Considering Cas rarely doubled down on anything or qualified his statement when he thought his first Yes/No/What answer had been sufficient, that was as ringing an endorsement as anything Dean had ever expected. It made him pop out a “Cool,” before he could even reflect on it.

Cas was silent for a few seconds, then he turned slightly in the arm Dean had over his shoulder, and put his hand on Dean’s chest, palm flat right in the center. It was an oddly deliberate gesture. He’d told Dean at one point during these huddles of theirs about being able to follow nerve impulses; he said it was ‘interesting’ and ‘rather beautiful’, which had just led Dean to remember once again that yeah, not human. Maybe that was what Cas was doing now. Or checking out the state of Dean’s lungs. Or-

Cas took his hand away abruptly and curled up against Dean. 

“I just never imagined angels to be, um-...” Dean tried to find an alternative to the word ‘cuddly’, because one of the things Cas had taught him was that some words had immense power, and that one would surely rewrite the laws of the universe if applied to either of them. 

“Angel or human. We all need this,” said Cas simply, slipping his arm around Dean’s waist. “This feeling of closeness with another. Of being allowed in. A shared gesture that pleases us both.”

Dean muttered something about Meg Ryan moment out of pure knee jerk reflex. 

...It occurred to Dean that he’d shown something new to Cas every night they’d had sex before.

It occurred to him that Cas might actually think this was a continuation of that ‘what people do in bed’ education. Especially since he’d just brought up closeness, sharing, being allowed in. 

It occurred to Dean that he did not know what to do with that thought. On the one hand, why not? This _was_ something people did in bed, and it was nice (even a tough SOB like Dean could admit that, if not out loud), and yeah.

Okay. He really needed to have that conversation.

“Cas...um...look, about closeness...”

There was a faint movement from Cas, leaning back an inch to see if Dean was going to manage to haul out the rest of that sentence.

Dean coughed. “I mean, specifically- ” he turned his head to the door, hearing footsteps. They were followed by a quick knock. 

“Hey. Um, sorry to bother you guys. Andrea called, she’s got a hot one at some gun-nut convention center she’s at in St. Louis. She’s there with her cousin, Agatha Marks? And, well, you know what Aggie’s rap sheet is like, she can’t go near the convention. Andrea only called to ask me to be phone handler, she said she could manage the hunt itself solo, but I dunno. Sounds like she might need backup and you’re not that far out.”

Thank god.

Dean refused to let himself believe he’d thought that. Even though he had.

 

\---

 

“I don’t need any help,” Andrea snapped while her hotel door was still swinging open, and then her mood got even worse when she looked past Dean and her eyes centered on Cas. “Where’s Sam? Who’s that?”

“Sam’s manning the phones like you asked him to, and this is Cas.”

“Cas who?” Andrea asked with the natural suspicion that came from being a Hunter. Or possibly from Tennessee. 

“Well right this minute he’s actually Cliff Williams, FBI, but between you and me, it’s, um, just Cas.”

“Castiel,” Cas said with a faint nod at Andrea.

Andrea’s left eyebrow quirked up. “What, like the angel?” Her tone said, ‘pretentious much?’

“That’s the one,” said Dean. “Can we come in or we gonna have Bible Studies right here in the hallway?”

“Right. Maybe he should introduce himself as Cliff,” Andrea added in a mutter, glancing over her shoulder. “Aggie’s come over to talk strategy.”

“And?”

“Aggie has, ah, views. She hates religion almost as much as she hates demons,” Andrea confessed in one quick whisper. “Let’s not get her started.”

“It’ll be fine, Cas won’t take it personal,” Dean assured her, brushing past the hunter without bothering to go into the past where Cas himself had taken a torch to a few extremist religions. 

 

\---

 

Aggie was the same paranoid nutcase Dean remembered from a couple of years back, so she and Andrea reluctantly let Dean handle matters in St. Louis. The fact that Aggie couldn’t go near the gun expo and sales center without NSA surveillance lighting up like a Christmas tree might have had something to do with it, and Andrea did not want to leave her cousin unattended in a large city (though she didn’t put it quite that way). Aggie was more the kind of gal to go hunting Wendigos with a bowie knife than play nice in anywhere with more than three people per square mile. Andrea took her to follow up on a possible related issue off in a tiny town a few hours away while Dean and Cas tackled the original problem of convention-goers from out of town disappearing or ending up dead in a ditch with suspicious damage to their throats. 

Dean found himself happy with the arrangement and in the zone. It was starting to really work, even without Sam - or rather, having Sam be the brainy Man of Letters book guy one phone call away, and possible backup if things went sideways. Cas was still pretty bad at pretending to be the FBI or anything useful, but the two of them were clicking now, working around stuff like that. Dean was at the forefront with his badge and his blasé explanations, Cas was the weird intense guy behind him who’d get reluctant people to talk in the hopes that what they’d say would make him blink and stop staring at them like that _please!_ It worked.

“Yeah, vampires here too,” Dean said in the phone, looking out the grimy window to a building further up the street. “They’re holed up in an abandoned community center in the scarier part of St. Louis.”

“That don’t narrow it down much, Dean.”

“Hahaha. How about you guys?”

“Same. Looks like they left two of their ‘family’ in this rat-hole village near the highway to do their own startup nest. These guys have plans.”

“And guns. You sure you guys can handle-“

“Finish that sentence, Winchester, and I’ll get Aggie on the phone.”

“Fine, fine.”

“How about you and ‘Cliff’? We just got two fang-bangers here, maybe three if they’ve already turned their latest vic. You got the prize. There could be a dozen. And they’ve been buying heat like it’s about to be regulated to Canada levels. They could have an army surplus tank in there-”

“We’ll manage.”

“You don’t have your brother with you, Dean. That friend of yours, I mean, you sure a newbie can handle watching your back?”

Dean grinned at Cas (who looked back at him blankly). “He’s been around longer than you might think, Andrea. Gotta go, I’m not waiting for nightfall and neither should you.”

“I won’t. Listen, Dean, I know you’ve been doing this since before I had braces, if you started as early with your Dad as they say you did, but can you promise me you’ll do this the smart way? Creep in, whack off heads while they sleep, maybe leave your buddy behind to help with cleanup afterwards? I don’t want to have to explain to Sam that I left you in St. Louis to get yourself killed.”

“We’ll be fine, Andrea,” said Dean rather than lie.

“Watch yourself,” was Andrea’s goodbye.

Creeping up on the place, taking off as many heads as possible and then getting shot at was the Winchester default plan, granted. But Dean was not one to stay hidebound or not use his full arsenal.

So instead of Andrea’s ‘smart’ way, they did it the Dean&Cas way. Which meant Cas walked right up to the front door of the gym part of the center and exploded it with one touch. Sure, this woke up all the vamps, but since these guys could smell traces of Grace in blood same as their Purgatory counterparts, half of them bolted while the dumber half stayed behind to riddle an angel with perfectly useless bullets while he flitted from one to the other, doing his thing. Dean had chained up all the exits he could find before letting Cas loose, leaving only the one back door open from which the smarter fangs came running out in ones and twos, right into his machete. 

It only got dicey right at the end, when the last few alive figured out how screwed they were. They broke out a high lean-to window leading to the metal roof and fired down at Dean, who had to take cover inside the building - which brought him face to face with the last one who’d been trying to catch his back while Dean was distracted. This guy only had a flick blade, but he was good with it, he came closer to causing Dean problems than the ones who had picked up guns but were more used to fists and fangs. 

By the time Dean had put down his dance partner, the two on the roof had fallen like overripe fruit into the basketball court beneath their post, each with a neat stab wound through the heart.

“So that works on vamps too, huh?” Dean said, jutting his chin towards the blade in Cas’s hand. The angel had stepped out of thin air at Dean’s side and was already reaching for the - very minor - knife-gaze on Dean’s forearm.

“Yes.” Cas’s touch was warm even through Dean’s jacket - which found itself miraculously repaired and blood free a second later, as was Dean’s skin. “But we should behead them anyway, to be safe.”

“Lemme.”

A few whacks later, and they were away before somebody in the neighborhood judged that that had been a few more gunshots than the norm and called the police.

 

\---

 

Sam sent them on a possible haunting on their way back, which took a few more days. Then it was bunker sweet bunker.

“I don’t understand. What is the purpose of this?” Cas stared intently first at the gun range and then the Ruger Dean was showing him as if they could answer his question better than the human could.

“I told you, I’m going to teach you how to shoot.”

“Why?” asked Cas, looking flummoxed.

“It could come in handy one day.”

Cas gave him a penetrating look urging him to come up with one solitary example. Of course Dean had had the whole trip back from St. Louis to think one up. If both vamps and Abaddon were packing these days, why leave the angel alone in the swashbuckling age?

“What if you’re caught in a circle of holy fire? And some guy is standing twenty feet away, gloating that you’re helpless. How satisfying would it be to pull out a piece and shoot that guy in the face?”

“Anything that knows enough to use holy fire is unlikely to be affected by bullets,” Cas pointed out.

“Unless it’s a demon, and you’re packin’ devil traps.”

Cas seemed to weight that for a moment and said, “Yes.”

“Which nail even Abaddon.”

“Yes.”

“Could save your life.”

“Yes, Dean, you’re right.” Cas glanced up from the Ruger to fix those penetrating blue peepers on Dean. “Show me.”

Ten minutes later, Dean was leaning over Cas, hand on his while the angel held the Ruger, chest to Cas’s back- it was a really good thing there was a gun in play, because firearms trumped everything else in Dean’s book and gave him a chance to ignore just how very sexy this could get with very little effort otherwise.

“Okay, now remember what I said, don’t pull-“

CRACK!

Cas hadn’t twitched a millimeter from the recoil, however he had pulled up, not surprisingly. The bullet pinged off concrete above the target and hit the pillars put there to catch just such rebounds.

“Okay,” Dean said, “now - _Cas!_ ”

Cas glanced around from where he’d been looking down the barrel. 

“Don’t- what did I just tell you not _ten minutes ago!_ About where you don’t point a gun!”

Cas’s eyes flickered faintly to the left, recollecting. “Don’t point a gun at anything you do not want to kill.”

“Exactly!”

”The gun can’t kill me.”

”...Granted. But- but the bullet could rebound off your thick angelic skull and hurt _me_.”

“No, it would dissipate it’s energy in- I’m sorry, you’re right. Those were the rules.” Cas put the gun down on the range’s bench, looking appropriately contrite.

“You may be bulletproof, buddy, but the people around you aren’t. This isn’t just about learning to fire a piece, it’s good for you to know ballistics and how guns behave in case you see one pointed at me or Sam one day. Let’s take it back from the top.”

It only took two more shots before Cas got the hang of it. Then he went from firing wild to machine like precision. 

Dean made him try again with the mojo ‘tuned down’, because as the past had shown, Cas could find himself short on juice one day - which would be when a gun would come in extra handy. Cas didn’t grumble about the imposition, good soldier that he was, and continued target practice with a little less than god-level precision, but still impressive. 

“Yeah, knew you’d be good at this,” Dean said, bringing up the target. 

Cas’s lips moved-

“Hold on.” Dean took off his ear protection. “You were sayin’?”

“This is an ingenious mechanism. The last time I was on Earth was briefly at the turn of the 20th century. I saw a revolver being used from a distance. It was in no way this powerful or compact.” Cas was looking down at the Ruger - held safely towards the end of the range this time - with an interested air that made Dean’s heart glow. They did say couples should share a common interest.

“C’mon. Shooting’s just half the job. Now I gotta show you field stripping and cleaning.”

“Dean?”

“Hm?” 

“Thank you.”

“Oh hey, no big-“

“I would like to repay you by teaching you something in turn,” said Cas smoothly in a way that made Dean wonder if this wasn’t something he’d been planning all along.

Once the lesson was finished, Cas walked Dean to the next room over, which was a small gym with practice mats on the floor, old and yellowing from age but still serviceable. 

“What you want to show me?” Dean asked, puzzled, turning around on himself. He’d been here a few times to do a bit of physical training when he’d injured himself, but most times he practiced his punches on live targets.

Cas was rooting around in a cupboard off to one side and drew back with two knives.

”...Really, dude? I know you’ve been Errol Flynn-ing it for a few million years and all, but you really think you got something I don’t?”

Cas said, “I do think that I could-“

Flutter-

”-teach you to fight against angels and demons who can appear behind you,” said Cas right into Dean’s ear.

Dean would later describe his leap away at the word ‘teach’ as something with ‘tiger’ in it, rather than ‘startled stumble’.

“Dude, don’t-...” Dean regulated his breathing and waited for his heart to stop ricocheting around his ribs. “That’s not something anybody can train for. Uh...Is it?”

Cas handed Dean one of the knives - a practice knife, Dean realized right away, thumbing the edge. “I believe you can. In the past five months, I’ve had evidence that your senses are more fine-tuned than we might think. At any rate, it would be useful to learn to fight against angels. I hope you won’t have to, but if you do, then we all have very uniform technique.”

“Learn to fight you, learn to fight ‘em all. I can get behind that.” Dean twirled the blade between his fingers, feeling the balance. It was only fair, Cas had been a sport about the gun practice. “Fine, teach, whatcha going to show me?”

Cas looked around vaguely, then tugged at his tie- which found itself in his hands without having to unknot or otherwise slip over his head. 

“Here, cover your eyes with this.”

“What now?” Dean’s voice wavered just a little as his eyes flashed from the tie to Cas’s 100% perfectly serious expression. 

“To start with. I think this will help train your senses.” Cas took the knife out of Dean’s hand and put both weapons down on the mat near his feet, then extended the tie again.

Dean licked his lips, looked at the tie, at the comfy mats all around them, at the vaulting horse pushed off to one side, at the- Jesus, where was his mind going. He forced himself to look back at Cas’s faintly puzzled expression.

”Right you are,” Dean said, clearing his throat and getting his mind out of the gutter.

Dean tied the improvised blindfold over his eyes - trying to ignore how this was trending towards some hot and steamy imaginings of his that dated back years. 

It took him less than ten seconds to figure out that the reality no way measured up to the fantasies. In fact he wondered how anybody could actually find this sexy, because all he felt was twitchy and vulnerable - in an un-fun way - even though he was in the safest place on earth with his best friend and lover. Maybe it’d be different if the circumstances were other. Dean tried to imagine this same scenario in bed, and had the deep intuition that he’d not enjoy it there either. Seemed like he’d found out what one of his kinks was _not_ at any rate, though that had probably not been the lesson Cas had intended. 

“So I just stand here and you give me multiple coronaries by popping up at my shoulder until I- wait. Cas, I don’t want to learn how to pin on instinct any angel that poofs in behind me. That’s a recipe for disaster. There’s you, and then there’s conceivably one or two of the holy lot up there who are not complete and utter dicks and don’t deserve to die because they put their hand on my shoulder when I didn’t expect it.”

“I agree.” Yeah, it wasn’t doing Dean’s nerves any favors to hear Cas’s voice ring out from a few feet away. “You would not be walking around with an angel blade drawn in your hand anyway. But a good punch to a vessel’s head will buy you a few seconds to determine the being’s intentions.”

”...Okay, I guess. Yeah.”

“If I am on the receiving end - or the few, ah, ‘not a dick’ angels - we will not be injured in any significant way. I promise to be understanding if that happens.” There was a smile in his voice.

“Haha. Okay, fine, let’s do this.”

Dean felt like Luke Skywalker, swinging wildly at little zappy robots with a bucket on his head while Obi Wan Kenobi stood around doing jack. The first half dozen times Cas popped up behind him, Dean would flail and miss by a mile. Cas was perfectly patient about it - more than Dean was - and just did it again. Dean forced himself to swallow the irritation and try to relax. Not that he had any hopes this wasn’t completely useless and rather humiliating.

He stood there, waiting- and then slammed his elbow back. 

It smacked against something hard -a palm that wrapped around his upper arm and jerked him down on the same move. Dean hissed and windmilled his arms- but another hand had caught him around the waist, arresting his downward fall. 

Dean ripped off the tie. He was still off-balance - he was actually caught like he’d just been dipped during a tango, dammit. And Cas was looking down at him with a- an air of approval and almost pride in his eyes, in the small curve of his lips.

“Very good, Dean.”

“Uh- but you knocked me over.”

“Yes. It was instinctive,” Cas admitted, eyes crinkling. “Because you came right at me. We’ll work on riposte once we have the initial reaction down right.”

Cas was holding him up so-...steady. It was...Dean should feel extremely uncomfortable like this but- but he wasn’t. At all. 

His mouth was dry and the urge to reach up and kiss Cas was overwhelming. End up on the mats. Roll over, rip off clothes-

Dean heaved himself to standing position. “Right,” he said, apropos of nothing. Then dragged his mind back to the lessons. “Sure, I hit right at you but it could have been a coincidence. Can’t really say I felt the Force guiding me or anything.”

“Let’s try again then,” Cas said, completely unruffled. “If you want to.”

“Uh. Let’s work on knife techniques now, we’ll practice the mojo sensing again tomorrow. Then I, er, have to go take a shower.”

What followed was brutal. Cas did not and never had pulled a punch much, and it wasn’t in Dean’s nature either. The knives were blunt but they could still hurt, and Cas’s angel band-aids went into play each time a point was scored. It was intense and challenging and wicked fun, and Dean blamed his earlier dirty thoughts on the fact that this was just as inappropriately exciting as anything else they’d done so far today.

That shower was needed ASAP.

 

\---

 

Dean glowered at the tiles through a downpour of warm water, struggling with a problem he’d had several times in the past few weeks.

His memories were having a pillow fight, trying to decide which was going to get him harder under the warm pitter-patter; the one where he’d been plastered over Cas to improve his aim at the range, or the one where Cas had held him up like he was freakin’ Ginger Rogers after a dip, or the way Dean had managed to pin Cas to the floor after a leg swipe-

Dean hadn’t actually jerked off all that much since the Crowley business. Oddly enough. It was probably proof that he was getting old, Dean decided. Though before Cas had popped back into his life again, he’d used the Men of Letters shower assiduously for purposes other than cleaning on a pretty damn regular basis, and that had only been a couple of months ago...Now he just didn’t feel that much of an urge, despite what should feel like constant provocation. 

...The ‘getting old’ explanation was infinitely better than the one he suspected was the case, which was that cleaning out the clockwork made him feel like a cheating heel. Like he was being unfaithful. To Cas - who had no interest in sex. With a shower. While in his mind the words ‘you need to have THAT TALK you asshole’ were emblazoned across the tiles instead of the staid black and white pattern the Men of Letters had opted for. 

Goddamn, if Dean died from a case of blue balls, he’d make sure his soul ended up in Hell just to give him that added chance to knife Crowley in the ribs.

He needed to have that talk. It didn’t have to be a heavy thing. The advantage of having waited these few weeks (Dean told himself and his conscience) was that now it was real obvious where things stood, that Cas had zero interest in sex. So Dean just had to...lay out his cards and explain he didn’t mind-

All the permutations of the conversation would start to run through his brain and end up in dangerous territory. Truth was, he was scared to talk about it. Because he couldn’t be sure what the outcome would be, because he couldn’t control where this would leave them. Shit like this blew up in his face all the time, this was why he usually opted for repression and booze.

Tomorrow night. Or the day after, for sure.

\---

 

It became a thing. Once Cas got up to speed on guns, they had ladder tournaments with Sam, dragging him away from his screen and books to focus on something healthy and loud. Then Sam joined in on the knife training too - which Dean had not expected. Not that he minded. Of course. Oh hell, of course he minded, in a tiny nasty ugly part of his brain that did not like to see Cas put his hands on anybody else. But the thing was...mostly it was kind of fun. In fact it was a whole lot of fun. 

Then at night, he and Cas would watch TV curled up on the couch, or hang out in Dean’s room under the covers and eventually Dean would fall asleep, dreams deep and serene. He’d barely had more than a couple of beers a day this month, he felt fit, full of go-juice and in what Sam referred to as a constant state of cavity-inducing good mood. 

The conversation lurked, and the longer Dean waited the nastier it seemed to get, the more it threatened this...whatever it was that he and Cas had together, that made them both fucking happy so what the hell was wrong with that, huh?! C’mon, Life! 

Every day there was a new reason to skip over words that needed to be said. 

Until near the end of Week Five when Sam’s phone did _not_ ring 666...

But Crowley came up anyway


	5. Mind the Gap

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the fic goes into a somewhat odd direction, as mentioned at the start (or maybe it's not odd and there's lots of fics with this angle out there, I've not read more than a fraction of the 180,000+ SPN fics on this archive alone). The first oddity is that, guess what, Crowley was mostly right. Second oddity...it's a _good_ thing he screwed with Dean's brains, ultimately.

How bad an asshole was Crowley? 

So bad he could cause drama when he _wasn’t even there._

\---

Dean pushed the slide release on his colt, one ear on Sam’s side of the conversation. 

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay, thanks, Andrea, same to you.” Sam hung up, looking pleased (Dean was thinking of a way of getting Andrea Simmons to come and visit for awhile, as long as she left Aggie behind. St. Louis had gotten them reacquainted - and she seemed to be calling more and more, and always angling to talk to Sam. Andrea was a good hunter, she was tough, but with a sense of humor once you got to know her. More cunning smart than book smart but she still had a lot going on upstairs. She was also pretty cute in a long-boned outdoor girl kind of way, and she could field strip a rifle even faster than Dean could. He _might_ just concede she was good enough to date his brother.)

“So? No news?”

“Is good news,” Sam said, making a note on his laptop and crossing off a large square on the US map unfolded on the table beside him. “Demon signs are down across the board.”

“Think the British bitch ex-ed the ginger one?”

“That would be pretty incredible. But I think he’s isolated her.”

“That could make her more dangerous,” Castiel commented from where he was reading an obscure tome in the far corner of the library. Dean had tried to make him understand that cleaning one’s piece after shooting was part of the practice, but in some things Cas could be stubborn. He’d pick up the gun and it would be pristine when he handed it to Dean to put in lockup. 

He’d offered to do the same for Dean’s M1911, of course. Dean had shown that he could be just as stubborn. Of course.

“As long as she’s dangerous to Crowley,” Sam said with a shrug.

“And as long as he doesn’t call on us.” Dean jabbed the patch down the barrel a little more viciously than required.

“Yeah, we don’t need any more of his ‘clever plans’, we can take our own life and death chances, thank you. Hell, just talking to the bastard is a chore,” said Sam with an amused snort. “What’d he do to you last time? Commented on your sex life? Man, that’d make me celibate for the foreseeable future. Ugh.” Sam gave an exaggerated shiver.

Dean put down the barrel and rod, picked up the slide and brush, _don’t look don’t look don’t look-_ Cas wouldn’t have caught that, he was on the other side of the library- with angel ears on though, fuck. But surely he wouldn’t have picked up on-

“Dean?”

Cas was right there at his elbow. Dean’s jump knocked over the bottle of bore solvent. Sam stiffened and nearly sent his laptop careening off the table. 

“I need to talk to you,” Cas said in an utterly neutral tone.

“Uh-“

The library dissolved around them and reshaped itself into the walls of Dean’s bedroom. He was sitting on the side of the bed with the colt’s slide in one hand and the brush in the other, and Cas standing in front of him. 

“Dude, no, you do not leave half my gun behind-“

Cas, without blinking or breaking that creepy-staring eye contact, clicked his fingers.

There were no more gun parts in Dean’s hands.

“Yeah, but it’s still in pieces, a guy doesn’t-...” Dean dried up under the strength of that look.

“Dean?”

Dean stared at the oncoming eighteen wheeler of a bitch of a conversation and didn’t see many ways to dodge. “Yeah?”

“What did Sam mean, Crowley commented on your sex life?”

Dean rolled his eyes dismissively. “What do you think? He’s been ragging us about hooking up before you and I even knew that was a thing that could happen. Now he’s figured out we’re actually an item, probably through his Smarmy Bastard powers, so he poked fun at us. He’s a dick. Don’t worry about it.”

“I wouldn’t.”

But. There was going to be a but.

“But we haven’t had sex since you talked with him.” Damn angel memory. 

Ten different excuses slotted through Dean’s head. They were all lies. And he didn’t want to lie to Cas.

He wet his lips-

“We do not let Crowley get in our heads!”

Whoa. Dean could count on the fingers of one hand the times Cas had raised his voice like that. He was pissed. Cas and Crowley had bad blood between them. 

“Jeez, Cas, cool it. Yeah, I know Crowley’s an asshole, but the thing is, everything he told me was the truth-“

“It always is! That’s what makes it so _insidious!_ ”

“Yeah. But it’s still the truth.” The light above their heads was shivering oddly, a sprinkle of dust falling through the beams as if picking up tremors from a distant earthquake. Dean grimaced and ran his fingers through his hair, battling down a flash of irritation of his own - Crowley being a bastard wasn’t a news flash. But for once Dean recognized the first tendril of anger for what it was - a reaction to defensiveness, pain, guilt at having dodged this for so long. Anybody else would have gotten the Dean Winchester attitude and maybe the Dean Winchester fist as a bonus - and hell, he and Cas had had some dust-ups in the past, but not today. Today there was something actually at risk that mattered more than kicking and biting against the crap Life dished out. Dean forced himself to relax his hands and shoulders and simmer down. 

“What did he tell you?” Castiel ground out, crossing his arms and apparently planning a raid on hell to put a divine smite up the little git’s ass.

“He...uh...” Yeah, this wasn’t awkward. But this was Cas, who didn’t really embarrass. And this needed to be said. Almost a month ago, actually. “He just pointed out that you’re not getting that much out of having sex with me.” 

A slow wrinkle creased Cas’s brow. “He’s wrong.”

Despite knowing better, Dean felt a flutter of hope.

“I like the intimacy.”

Which got predictably dashed.

“Yeah. I’m sure you do.” Dean waved him down next to him on the bed. “You like curling up together under the sheets or on the couch too.”

“Yes,” Cas said, sitting down next to Dean. 

Dean looked at him to see if he was getting the point. Cas looked back with an expression that confirmed he did not even know there was a point there to get.

“And the sex specifically? What do you like about sex that you wouldn’t get by being wrapped in each other under a blanket and talking?”

Cas looked puzzled. “Sex pleases you. I like giving you that.”

_...And there’s the kiss of death. That’s what I was running away from all these weeks. I knew it but I dodged hearing it out loud like a fucking coward._

Dean rubbed a smudge of gun oil off his hand onto his jeans, then turned to face Cas more fully, pulling a knee up onto the bed. 

“Yeah,” he said softly, looking down at the cover rucked up between them. “You see...that doesn’t do it for me.”

Cas tilted his head, analyzing that with a growing frown. 

“I know you mean well. And I get your vessel off for added bonus - assuming that even is a bonus for you. But really, it’s not...mutual.”

“The-“

“Don’t say intimacy. I got that bit. But that’s not all sex is. Or maybe you would have noticed I called that off a month ago now.”

“I noticed.”

Dean’s eyebrows arched. “Did you? Didn’t you wonder why?”

Cas was silent for a second, as if digging up the reason and polishing it off and giving it a dubious look before presenting it. “No. I thought it was normal. We had a lot of sex to start with, and your usual rhythm is every other week.”

Jesus. That had _not_ been what Dean had expected. Math of all things. “What, you were seriously waiting, er, fourteen weeks and change - were you going to say anything then?”

A faint frown line plied the space over Cas’s eyes. ”...No.”

At least he was honest. That was going to help rip this band-aid off quickly rather than drag it out. “You just didn’t think about it too much. Right? You knew I’d start something if I wanted some. Since you’re not interested for your own sake, though, why bother asking for it. But there’s a difference between being okay with it, and _wanting_ it. Wanting-...” Wanting me.

Cas stared at him.

“See where I’m going with this?” Dean finally asked.

“...Yes.”

Dean’s last little bastion of hope that his angel would pull a magical sex-loving rabbit out of his hat and make this all go away crashed and burned.

Cas’s gaze left Dean’s to fix straight ahead at the door, hands on his knees. “The human sex drive evolved over millions of years to enable reproduction. Angels...”

“Don’t reproduce,” Dean finished softly.

“No.“

“And you don’t have bodies. Not the real you. Not real bodies. Not flesh and blood and-...well, you know.” Dean finished with an abortive gesture at his groin, then kind of wish he hadn’t.

“No.”

There was a silence, a long silence. Then Cas looked straight back up at him. 

“I see.” His voice was as neutral as if he was reading off a news ticker. “I’m sorry. I should have made it clear from the start that the desire you felt was never reciprocated.” 

Wow. Just rip out my guts, thought Dean. 

Cas stared right at him with no signs of shame, embarrassment or reluctance. He seemed to be ruminating. Finally he stated: “There is a lot of differences in the way mortals have sex. Some humans would not care about this.”

“How the hell would you know that?” Dean asked, startled by the astuteness of the observation- then he rubbed his face savagely. “If it has anything to do with your porn viewing history, please don’t tell me.”

“You are not like that.”

”...No. Kind of the opposite actually.”

“I knew that from the start. Which was why I was relieved-...You do pleasure my vessel, and I thought that would be enough to satisfy you. I’m sorry it isn’t. But you are a sexual being. I am not. Carnal sensations have no equivalent in my kind. I don’t perceive them the way you do. And they have no emotional connection to me beyond the pleasure they give you.” Cas was still looking at him straight and steady, as if this wasn’t flaying him inside at all. Maybe it wasn’t. 

Dean rubbed his eyes. “...Yeah. I know. S’okay, Cas.”

“I understand.”

“Hm?” 

”That you’ll need to find this with other humans. You-”

The bed squeaked as Dean tensed and threw up one hand. “Whoa! Stop right there!”

Cas looked at him stolidly.

Dean shook his head and gave him a grin - an honest to goodness grin, and almost certainly not a grimace. “Come on, once a guy’s gone angel, he can’t go back, right?”

A frown wrinkled that brow.

Dean gave up on the grin. “Don’t go there, Cas. It’s not worth it,” he said simply. 

Deep inside Dean’s gray matter, the primitive ape portion thereof - the part conveniently hotwired to his dick - was howling, but Dean wasn’t going to let that influence him. He’d seen enough action in the past two decades to keep him primed for shower funtimes for the foreseeable future - and now that the cat was out of the bag, he had a feeling he’d be able to enjoy them more. Hopefully. What was sure was that he would chop it off before he ever gave Cas the slightest bit of pain on that account, even if he knew damn well his angel was going to say-

“That hardly seems fair to you. You are a sexual creature, Dean, I do not want to deny you-“

He fell silent when Dean leaned forward abruptly to cover his mouth with one hand. 

“Cas-...look. I’m not saying we won’t have sex ever again. Sure, there’s one hell of a gap between us - shit, between our species. But as long as you really - _really_ \- don’t mind on your end, then eventually I think I can work around this. You know. In a year or two,” Dean said, prompted to honesty by the monkey side of his brain that was currently contemplating suicide. It would be bad enough if he couldn’t hit up his usual bar fodder. The idea that he’d be bundled up with Cas every night and not touch that really, really fine ass ever again, lick his way up that chest to lay siege to those gorgeous lips, or hear Cas ask those weird questions in that voice like liquid sex on the rocks- yeah. He gave himself a year, tops, to forget Crowley, forget all the insinuations and that Cas was only putting up with it for Dean’s sake, before he hit that again. He wasn’t proud of himself, but at least he was an honest lowlife horn-dog.

“If you think you’ll want to have sex then,” said Cas, predictably and understandably confused as he leaned sideways to bypass the hand on his mouth, “why would you mind now? Dean, I truly have no problem having sex with you. I do have a v-...a body. In part. You...” Cas might be hard to read at times but Dean had gotten good at reading him. There was a little hurt behind the perplexed look, the small pause. “You said I was what was missing.”

God damn it, this was the other reason Dean had dodged this conversation. Because he knew he could talk until he was blue in the face, spin it any which way, prove to Cas like a mathematical equation that Dean was okay with this and Castiel should be too...he just knew Cas was still going to end up a bit hurt by this anyway. So was Dean in all likelihood, but he deserved it for not having seen the pitfalls in this right from the start - well he had, but then he’d let his junk do the thinking rather than make _sure_ him and Cas were on the same page. This really was all on him.

Dean’s hand fell to Cas’s shoulder, gave it a small grip and shake. “Yeah, you are, Cas, that’s just it. It’s not your body. It’s...well, it’s _you_. You’re the missing piece.” And now he sounded like a teen romance movie. Awesome. 

That earned him a look of non-comprehension. 

“I know it’s not possible, but imagine something happened to you, and Jimmy came back...do you think I’d even consider for a minute hooking up with him?” Dean asked gently.

The blue eyes widened. ”...No.” 

Dean’s hand started to rub up and down Cas’s upper arm, slow and warm and steady, as if this could somehow cushion what was being said right now, the small thing being broken. “That’s what I mean. I do want you, Cas, and I understand you want to, uh, you know, make me feel good. And one day I’m pretty sure we can work with that, figure something out. Just...give me a bit of time. Having the desire all on my side, all take and no give, that’s...that’s a bit off-putting for me. Because when it comes down to it, you, the real you, the angel of grace and wavelengths and all that, there’s absolutely nothing you want with this ass of mine. Right? You’re all about what’s inside, not on the outside, which most people would say makes you a better man than me. Yeah?” 

Castiel opened his mouth as if to answer, but closed it abruptly instead and looked away.

“You’re not Balthazar and those other losers who got handsy once the rules went out the window. And between you and me, Balthazar was trying too hard, it was downright embarrassing. I bet he didn’t get it either, he just liked breaking the rules for the hell of it. And that’s so not you. You see, that’s what Crowley put through my skull - and yeah, I know he was being a bastard and trying to throw a wrench in the works. But he can’t touch _us_. We won’t let him. Seriously, Cas, don’t ever- the fact that you’re here with me, that’s _everything_. The sex, it’s just an extra.” 

Wait, said a little voice inside.

But he wasn’t going to wait for objections from his monkey brain.

“I appreciate that our emotional connection is fulfilling to you, Dean, but I know you are a highly sexualized man. It may be an extra, but it’s still important.” Those blue eyes were grilling him mercilessly, making Dean’s mouth go dry. “Disallowing that entire side of your human ability to connect to others- that’s not fair to you.”

Dean shrugged - a bit unevenly as the words ‘fulfilling emotional connection’ and a lack of shower activity on his part seemed to try to connect together like two puzzle pieces that in Dean’s world shouldn’t actually belong to the same picture...

“I don’t see it that way. The way I’m seeing it, I’m keeping what matters.” He gave Cas’s arm an extra squeeze and stood up.

Wait! wailed a part of his brain as he turned away. Wait, you missed something!

He was going to miss a lot. Some of the best sex he’d ever had, for starters. But even the memory felt tainted now as he remembered everything they’d done in a new light. In the light of Cas just letting him essentially-

...No. Wait. He had missed something.

Dean twisted back and stared at Cas, sitting there disconsolately with his gaze directed blindly at the floor.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

”...Which question?”

“I asked-...I asked if there was anything you wanted from me. On the physical side. You didn’t answer.”

Cas looked puzzled for half a second- but then an odd expression chased that one away. Cas wasn’t big on emoting because - as he had just reminded Dean not two minutes ago - he and his body weren’t connected along all sets of wires. It was rare to see anything other than the ‘loud and clear’ expressions, or the intentionally broadcast ones, cross his face. 

Dean had never seen Cas look cagey before. That...was new. And to get through that gap between Cas and the vessel’s facial muscles...

“I thought the question was rhetorical.”

“No. No it was not. And you did not answer it.”

“I-...” And then the angel of the lord stalled. For the first time ever in Dean’s recollection.

“Fuck. Me.”

“...What?”

“There is, isn’t there.”

“No,” Cas answered, gaze now nailed to the floor. 

“You said that too quickly,” Dean shot back, voice pitching a little higher than the norm. “Cas- this is important. You can’t lie to me right now. I- dude, I opened up about this, I ripped out my heart and shoved it at you, I just gave up on _sex_ until we can figure this out- or even if we can’t! You can’t hold ‘em or fold ‘em now, man, it just doesn’t work that way. Spill!”

Those blue eyes widened in something like alarm. And then his straight shooter angel looked away quickly again as if-

“...There really is something. Something I can give you. Something you want.”

“I...”

“Oh man. You even want it _bad_.” Dean took a few steps towards him, trying to catch his eye. Which Cas was making difficult by looking anywhere but at Dean.

“And you’re bloody _embarrassed_ about it.”

Cas got a holy stubborn look on his face that indicated the conversation was Over. As if that would happen.

He swapped that look for a startled one when Dean shoved him back onto the bed and crawled over him, pinning his shoulders to the sheets. “It’s something _filthy!_ ” He gasped because under his fingers he’d felt- “Holy shit! I’ve never seen you flinch like that before. I hit it right on the mark, didn’t I.”

“No!” Cas shot back, still scowling. “Not at all.”

“Oh I did. You can’t hide it.” Dean stared down in fascination. “So, what is it?”

“ _Nothing._ ”

Dean snorted. “It’s some very bizarre way of fucking me, isn’t it.”

Cas gaped, then snapped: “No! I am not a sexual being, Dean, that’s not at all what I-..” then he stopped abruptly, but too late. Obviously.

“Hah, so there _is_ something. Glad we got that cleared up.”

“But it’s not-” Cas interrupted himself with a surprised stutter as Dean leaned over and propped an elbow against Cas’s chest to look at him real close. “D-Dean- what are you-“

Dean reached up and ran fingers, rough and quick, through Cas’s hair, ruffling it up. “Is it something terrible?”

Cas opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind a couple of times about what he wanted to say before he answered in a low irritated way, “No, not really, but you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, it’s just plain weird then.”

Cas opened his mouth again but this time nothing came out. This was amazing!

“So can you tell me?”

“No, Dean, it’s...to tell you the truth, it’s inappropriate.”

As if Dean needed any more reason to snap.

Cas gasped as Dean _wrapped_ himself around the angel and managed to wrestle and roll them both to somewhere closer to the center of the bed - and almost off the other side. 

“Dean?!”

A human might have ended up a bit bruised, especially when Dean, trying to stop them from tumbling further, felt pretty sure he’d kneed Cas hard in the thigh - but it wouldn’t make the angel blink. Because it was Cas. Because it was Cas!

Finally the springs stopped squealing and the headboard stopped thumping the wall, Cas was on his back roughly in the center of the bed - with his shoes still on and everything - and Dean was kneeling above him. Pretty much like they’d been that very first night together. 

“Come on,” Dean said, wrestling out of his boots. “We’re fucking. Right now.”

Cas gaped up at him. “What? Why?!”

“Because my angel wants to do something downright nasty with me, and I want to return the favor.” Duh.

“But you said that-...that-...that’s _nonsensical_.”

“You can’t say I’m wrong about you wanting something, though, can you.”

Castiel made a very unlikely sound in his throat. But he did not say Dean was wrong.

And Dean felt like he’d been lit on fire. A whole month without sex- what the fuck had he been thinking? No, no, his initial reasoning had been sound - and a lot of stuff that had needed airing out had gotten ventilated right on cue. 

But not anymore! His angel wanted to do something dirty to him - if Cas’s hedging was any indication - and that just turned Dean on so bad. 

Sure, Castiel still didn’t get sex, fundamentally. And Dean had a feeling, from the dancing around, that he wouldn’t get what Cas wanted later, but that was the point - they _were_ two completely and utterly different species and didn’t get a lot of stuff about each other. And that was key! Dean had let his own negative inner voice - and Crowley - put the worst spin on this that it could, but he’d not been looking at this straight. Dean was not taking advantage of some fellow human who just wasn’t into him physically but was putting up with the sex for the sake of their mutual feelings, or something equally heart-breaking. No, not at all. Dean was fucking an ageless angel of the lord riding a human vessel like a deep-sea diver’s suit and that was the most amazing thing to happen to him since ever. He’d somehow lost his perspective on just how weird this was in the first place, and that he had to come at it at a different angle and not put it in human terms at all.

And above all, it wasn’t one-sided. Not anymore. This opened the door. The hang-up had been mainly Dean’s anyway, he’d known he could work around the issue sooner or later, but now it turned out he wasn’t the only one hankering for something, that made ‘sooner or later’ into ‘tout fucking suite’. 

“Cas, final word, all the cards on the table like never before. You got _any_ objections to this? Sex?” Dean realized he’d grabbed a double handful of trench-coat and was a second away from shaking out an answer. 

All this time, Dean thought the angel had looked remarkably calm and collected on the subject. This angel now was a complete mess, mouth open, expression befuddled and unsure - and _wanting_ , if the way his eyes would flinch to and from Dean’s was anything to go by, and- damn this was hot. 

“Cas. Sex. With me. Still want?”

“I do not understand you at all,” said the angel, clearly irritated by the confusion and whiplash, but then his expression cleared a little and he propped himself up on his elbows to say a very firm and sensual “Yes” in Dean’s ear. 

“Good enough. Shed the clothes.”

Cas let himself relax back onto the bed and reached for his tie.

“Not like that.” Dean’s brain was doing all sorts of weird things. He’d forgotten. He’d _forgotten_ that it was _Cas_ and not some really hot guy he loved in his bed. Cas was a really hot guy Dean loved but that wasn’t all, Dean had not seen the whole package. This month-long breakdown between sex, feelings, Cas and everything had shown him a whole new way of looking at things - damn, he was going to have to send Crowley a fruit basket. Pineapples, strawberries, mangoes, the works. With tarantulas hiding in the bananas, since the hell-monkey had almost certainly been trying to fuck with them. And boy did Dean owe him solid.

“How am I supposed to-“

“Mojo.” Dean was smiling like something crazed, he knew it. “Get it all off.”

Cas blinked uncertainly. This wasn’t in the Dean Winchester playbook he’d been painstakingly mastering all this time by imitation - no instinct, Crowley had been right, but that also meant no hang-ups, no embarrassment, no preconceptions. He put his hands on his tie again, and his fingers _jerked._

And he was naked on the bed. 

“Awesome.” Dean chuckled - he might have even giggled, though it’d take a gun pressed to his melon to get him to fess up to it. “My clothes. Same.”

“I thought...just this morning you told me ‘a man does things with his hands, not with-’ “

“Yeah, but I just remembered you’re an angel. Come on, Cas,” Dean said with a rapacious grin, trailing a finger along a pec and snagging a nipple in passing. “Indulge me, and maybe I’ll indulge your fantasy too.”

Cas just stared at him, visibly adrift and trying to chart a course through this turn of events with the help of what he’d thought was a reliable instruction manual and turned out to be a map of Swaziland. “But...Dean, I need to make you understand. My...ah...’fantasy’ is not humanly possible.”

“We’ll get to that bit later.”

“We won’t, that’s the point,” said Cas with heavy patience.

“No, you’re missing the point.”

”...I am?”

“The point is that you _want_ something from me, Cas.”

“There are many things I want from you,” said Cas in that straight-and-steady voice that made Dean go gooey inside. “Better things,” he added with a touch of reproof.

That just made Dean snicker like a loon. “Ooh, ‘better’, huh? But that’s what makes this less about the prim and proper feelings and more about the dirty hard-core porn. Get it?”

Cas’s blank look said: not even remotely. 

Dean leaned forward slowly. Cas’s hands settled on his shoulders to get his shirt off- but Dean continued to lean until he was just a few inches away from Cas’s ear. “That thing you were thinking about,” he whispered.

A flash of irritation. “Dean-“

“I want you to think about it while we’re fucking.”

Cas gasped and jerked his hands away as if Dean’s body had burned him. “That- that’s _tasteless!_ ” 

“Don’t lay it on too thick or I’ll cream myself.” Dean drank in that appalled look - and the faint flush. The only time he’d ever seen Cas flush was when he’d gotten the vessel physically revved up. Oh yeah...Dean hadn’t needed that confirmation to know he was on the right track, but it was nice anyway. Very nice. So nice that Cas better mojo the jeans off real soon before Dean lost circulation somewhere important. 

Cas was staring at him, a scrutiny like a drill, and maybe he was starting to see the outline of an answer here because he wasn’t objecting anymore. 

“Trust me,” Dean started to say.

“I do,” was the immediate affirmation.

That was hot too. Dean licked his lips and focused. “What I’m trying to say is, this...this is what sex is. Okay?”

“No, it’s not. What I-...want has nothing to do with reproduction.”

“Cas, we’re two dudes, nothing about this has to do with reproduction anyway.”

Cas gave him an irritated ‘you are being deliberately dense’ stare. 

“No, look.” Dean put his hands on either side of Cas’s face. “You keep sayin’ humans are more than primates, well sex is more than squeezing out kids. Sex...sex is crude and it’s rude and it’s filling a basic _need_ inside. You said it yourself, it’s a way to connect. Random hookups are just a handshake, a feel-good band-aid over what we’re all aching for. _This_ is the real connecting - this is when it’s gotta be a give and take, a two way street. Even if our street starts and ends on different planets, doesn’t matter. That connection, it means trusting someone so much you can show him what makes you tick, what you really want, even- especially the stuff you never wanted to show before - whether it’s a kink or an emotion or a chink in the armor, that guy who really _gets you_ , he’ll understand, he won’t judge, or-“

Cas’s hand was on his mouth, silencing him, and his eyes were two still lakes of infinite depth. Dean suddenly felt he had gotten through, that Cas had found the parallels between what Dean’s words were trying to hack out and what he himself had been feeling. 

Fingers touched Dean’s shoulders. A rush of air- and he was naked too, a shiver of cold and excitement running over his skin. 

“Now you’re getting it,” Dean said, grinning and mouthing the fingers of the hand that had gentled over his lips.

“I don’t know,” Cas said very slowly, still staring at him unblinking. “Perhaps I am.”

Dean pressed a soft, burning kiss on Cas’s open mouth. “This thing you want to do,” he murmured against the corner of that firm jaw, “how badly do you want it?” 

“...Badly,” said Cas in a sacrilegious whisper, tipping back his head, exposing his throat. 

“I knew it.” Dean pressed lips, tongue, teeth to the soft spot near Cas’s ear. Felt a shudder and a flutter of pulse.

“But-“

“No buts. Buts come later - no pun intended.”

“Pun?”

Dean leaned back - while his fingers traced the skin he’d just licked and nibbled, thumb brushing into the dip of Cas’s throat. “Is it really filthy?” 

That earned him an eye roll - oh, but there was a glimmer of excitement there behind the curiosity. “The Host would think so. Yes.”

“Even better.” Lord, Dean was as hard as a rock, and that was essentially from talking and demon-induced abstinence. 

Fingers skidded over skin, hurried and unable to settle on just one caress, one grip, one feel...Dean reached for that beautiful cock, that ass - but that wasn’t all of Cas, and Dean wanted to rip off more layers, he wanted to _see_ , to taste just how different the two of them were. 

“Cas- do you actually need me to-...you know, prep you and all?”

Cas looked at him curiously. “No. Though I like the care you take when you do it.”

“Noted for future reference. But you don’t actually need it. Do you.”

“No.”

“Can we fuck now?” Dean whispered into his ear and got a major shudder through the usually stolid frame. 

“Yes,” Cas hissed.

Dean leaned back, appreciating the definition of the muscles tensing in the arms anchored to his shoulders, the flush that had come back to stay, the hard-on he was currently cupping in his palm. “What’s turning you on in this?” he asked, grinning at the savage freedom of being allowed the question, of even knowing the question existed. 

That earned him a blink as Cas considered his answer. “I feel more...involved. It’s different. But mostly it’s your excitement,” he added straightforwardly. “It’s a bleed-off. I am not looking but I can’t help hearing some of it when you’re broadcasting so loudly.”

“I bet it’s X-rated.”

“It is highly pornographic, yes,” said Cas with a twisted smile. “More so than usual. It’s...raw. It’s...”

“It’s the real deal. Don’t move, getting the lube.”

Dean surged to his knees, reached towards the bedside table, yanked out the drawer - almost made it fall off its hinges. He scooped contents out blindly onto the bedside table - a beer can ring, a box of condoms, the lube, a couple of loose bullets for his piece which promptly rolled onto the floor. His reached for the bottle-

Cas caught Dean’s other hand and tugged him back to his side. Hard. Dean could no more resist that pull than he could gravity. The surprise made him gasp. The implied strength that’d captured his wrist made other things trigger, dark delightful things squirming deep in his mind. 

“I don’t need that either,” Cas said with a calm face and a weirdly luminous light in his eyes, like they were about to flash neon blue.

“Uh, you sure about that? ‘Cause that could-“

“Dean?”

“Yeah?” Dean found himself looking a bit helplessly at the beside table until that gaze drew him back like he was in its orbit. 

Cas looked him straight in the eye and said with the precision with which he’d first picked up the Ruger - an alien object but interesting: “Fuck me.”

Oh god, this wasn’t going to last long.

Dean whimpered (in a manly way), rolled back over once again and reached for the condoms-

Only to find them missing. Poof. Bloody gone.

“Don’t need those either,” said Cas, still unblinking. 

“...Right you are.”

Dean stayed with his hand forming a fist where the box had been.

“Dean?”

”Yeah. Yeah. Just...give me a minute,” Dean said while fighting down the monkey inside that was screaming that he was going to take Cas right now like a fucking animal and _come in that_ and _claim_ him and- this was going to be record fast, but he would like it to last more than ten fucking seconds. 

One deep shuddery breath later and Dean was back in the game. Cas was lying on the bed, naked in utter glory, waiting. Dean, brain still buzzing and backfiring noisily, just plastered himself onto him for one hot wide-open kiss. Hands falling to Cas’s hips and giving him a jerk. Squirming up onto his knees, still tugging- Cas got the picture and his legs hooked around Dean’s ribs, pulled their bodies close as he rotated his hips up. Cushion, forgot the cushion- _forget_ the cushion! Dean’s cock had found that rippled giving-in place like it was a guided missile and who cared about fucking cushions. Some crude primal energy was thundering through his arm muscles and he could lift a baby grand piano right now, let alone an angel. 

“Cas-” Dean shoved the words out through teeth that just wouldn’t fully unclench, ”-you _really sure_ \- about the lube- ‘cause that could-“

“Trust me,” Cas said in a voice that hit a new level of low and raspy, and hell, what was Dean going to say to that, huh?

One hand holding Cas up by the hip, the other curled around a leg, Dean leaned forwards and pushed in gingerly, feeling for resistance-

And in and fucking _in!_

A really loud noise ripped from Dean’s throat because hot _damn!_

At the halfway point he’d tried to slow down, pull out a bit and then Cas had tightened those long legs of his, titled his pelvis further and just fucking _impaled_ Dean into him. And it was - it was tighter than usual but not- not alarmingly- it was just the right side of almost-painful and it was goddamn perfect.

Dean was wheezing like someone had punched him in the solar plexus. He didn’t dare move. If he moved even a twitch he was going to lose it. Whether it was the mana-from-Heaven astroglide of miracles or the lack of condom (goddamn ages since he’d done this bare) this just felt like- yeah, no comparison available, sorry, said what was left of Dean’s brain before it ripped off its shirt to hulk out like Bruce Banner on a bad day.

His body didn’t bother with similes, it was pulsing to the beat of a primitive drum. It pulled out and slammed in again, jerking Cas against the rumpled sheets. Dean checked his face to make sure this was okay- but - but Cas’s eyes were closed as usual.

“No- Cas! Look at me!”

The blue eyes flew open and Dean drank that straight-up stare right in and pulled out and slammed in again and those eyes widened - but no signs of discomfort (of course!) just that new glimmer of excitement he’d never had before- and man, he was hard too! 

“That’s right- look at me, angel-” 

Cas’s hands were gripping. Not wandering around looking for nerve impulses to admire or whatever, they were gripping Dean’s upper arms with the kind of strength that reminded Dean they could snap his bones like matchsticks- ohyesfuck!

“This is what it’s about! You feel that?!”

Those blue eyes- fucking drown in them- blinked, and Cas said, “Yes-” on the cusp of a gasp. 

Dean’s mouth and brain were communicating in distant semaphores at present, he barely knew what he was saying. Was ‘Feel that’ dirty talk for the way Dean was fucking deep into this angel that drove him crazy? Or was ‘feel that’ for the primitive yells of joy and possessive greed and love ringing through his mind which was what sex was all about? 

Was Cas getting this? Maybe not - but maybe yes, because that steady stare looked feverish for once - yes! - and when Dean pulled out, Cas’s legs around him tightened just a fraction - a burgeoning instinct? Come back in here, not letting you go, fuck me- fill me- _take me-_

Dean wanted to tear more of that out, he started to angle his thrusts- no, wait! Wrong tack! If he hit that sweet spot full on, that’d get the vessel off but mostly as a physiological reaction to all this rubbing and prodding. How could-

Cas blinked at the stutter of the hard rhythm, or maybe at the predatory smirk creeping onto Dean’s face and into his thoughts. 

“Nooo, no, I know damn well how to reach you, don’t I.”

”...What?”

“Reach you, angel. It’s not just this bod I want to fuck, you get that, right?”

Aww that was just so cute the way the puzzled head tilt mussed up his hair against the covers.

Dean forced his rhythm down to a slow deliberate grind. “Maybe I’m just boning a vessel right now, but it’s you in there, listening to me, getting flack from my brainwaves. You’re in there and I am gonna connect and drag you out and get right up into you.” The blue eyes were widening, Cas stared at him in something like unblinking fascination. “I’m going to take you apart - _you_. This ain’t about monkeys having sex, this is about this ape taking an angel of the lord down into the mud with him, making him feel things he shouldn’t, that you otherworldly types should never feel, against all the rules of god, man and nature-“

Cas gasped, whole body shuddering and tightening. Dean’s rhythm stuttered to a temporary halt-

“No,” Cas rumbled, glaring at him. His fingers tightened on Dean’s arm and a look of frustration answered Dean’s ripple of concern. ”I mean no, don’t stop. Dean, don’t stop- that-...that-” a hand waved near Dean’s face. 

Apparently Cas’s basic skills with vocabulary weren’t up to this or perhaps had undergone a meltdown, but either way it was obvious he wanted the crazy human to go right on talking, and Dean almost crowed.

“Oh you like that! Of course you do, you rebel you! You _do_ like breaking the rules! With _me!_ ”

Fuck! That hit the mark! Cas’s hands suddenly loosened, scrabbled and then grabbed onto his shoulders hard enough to leave welts- oh godyeah!

 _Shit!_ There was so much more to mine here! Dean wanted to keep going but he was now rather out of breath, his body had, without permission, picked up the punishing rhythm again and the countdown had started, he could feel himself tighten and coil - fuck it! But there was next time - Dean’s mouth was running with his thoughts without any barriers and it might even be making sense - and next time and the next and the time after that because as long as Cas was up for this, Dean would go on looking for ways to fuck his angel in all the ways the rules of creation had never intended.

And he wanted-

“Say my name again!” Dean gasped into that blinding radiant gaze plunging into his as he plowed in-

Cas didn’t even blink - swear to god, those eyes were one second away from flashing neon blue! His lips curved - in understanding and in excitement at it.

“Dean!” 

_“Fuck!”_ Dean hammered his fist into the mattress, convulsed and came with a whole-body shudder that pulsed everything he had into his lover’s body in massive, crashing waves.

Dean didn’t remember collapsing back onto the bed, face down, one arm tangled with Cas and fingers clutching what bit of Cas they could. He was panting like a racehorse, and he could feel Cas breathing hard too. 

With an effort that deserved a medal, Dean turned his head and glanced down. Wasn’t surprised to see Cas’s abdomen splattered with come, even though Dean hadn’t even touched him. That is, Dean hadn’t touched the vessel with his hands, but he’d touched the angel in charge where he really lived. Holy mother of fuck...Dean had never been a big talker in bed - hah, he was definitely more of a doer. More to the point, it was an occupational hazard to instinctively keep his mouth shut and not reveal more than he could get away with in any given one night stand. But the rules of the game had changed! Dean had never been into dirty talk before, but he had a feeling he was about to become both a convert and an expert.

Cas looked rather stunned - Dean yelled ‘Score!’ mentally and knew he’d actually earned it this time. Then the angel did the blinking thing again. Dean would have to ask him about that one day. Cas seemed to come back to himself in stages, and he tipped his head to one side to look at Dean. 

“That was fast,” he said without any hint of condemnation. It reminded Dean of their first time together and it made him chuckle and reach over, grab the the dork and hug him to himself and feel scarily sappy.

Shit. That’d been...’mind-blowing’ sounded trite, but it did feel like Dean was now scraping his brain off the insides of his skull. Reason was coming back in dribs and drabs, bearing jetsam and flotsam with it, thoughts eddying around and drifting away.

...Man, hopefully Sammy is still in the library. And with his earphones on...Never thought I’d be so loud, I’ve been doing it in motels most of my life...Hah, if Crowley could see that, he’d eat his fucking heart out, manipulative little shit...wow, the look on Cas’s face when I said-...I didn’t even know he could make that expression...bet he didn’t either...I wonder if he _got_ any of this...I wonder why I’m not embarrassed at the thought that he did...I wonder...I wonder...I don’t wonder, I fucking _know_ what we’re doing next time...gonna get my angel to pop this cherry of mine and I don’t even feel weird about it...but not right away...first got a kind of promise to keep...

Sweat and other fluids cooled. Dean felt cold all over except where he was touching Cas like an electric blanket. Hmmm...

“Think you can...” Dean clicked his fingers without opening his eyes. 

There was an interrogative silence (yeah, Cas could manage those).

“Clean us up?”

There was the faintest amused snort. Two fingers lightly brushed his shoulder and then Dean felt all nice and clean and dry. He made a deep groan of sated satisfaction, stole one sweet sweet kiss from soft contented lips, then he lazily hoisted himself up on one elbow and looked down.

”So now spill. What’s your kink, angel?”

Castiel sighed, gaze drifting towards the ceiling. “Dean, I tried to explain...”

“Yeah, yeah, I cut you off, don’t worry about it. I know it’s going to sound weird.”

“It’s not feasible.”

“That might be a problem to indulge you with it then,” said Dean calmly. “But that’s not what I asked. I asked what it was.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know.” Dean leaned in closer to Cas’s ear. “Because you want to tell me.”

That got him a bit of a flustered noise. “But. It’s not something you’d understand.”

“Like you don’t fundamentally understand sex?” Though maybe now Cas had an inkling...and he’d have a better one if he could choke out whatever he had on his mind. “Come on, Cas. What is it that’s got your feathers ruffled. I want to know. It might not be possible, but I still want to know. You get that now?”

“...Yes. I think I do.” Cas was giving him that straight-up stare again, the kind that made Dean’s eyes water and blink in sympathy. 

“So? C’mon, Cas,” Dean urged with a cheeky grin when the angel fell silent, “don’t be shy.”

“My problem is not one of timidity but of vocabulary,” he was tartly informed. “This is not something I have ever had to explain in a human language.”

“Oh. Right.” Dean remembered once again that his life was bat-shit crazy. 

“It’s...this,” Cas said, rolling on his side to face Dean and laying his hand flat out on Dean’s chest.

Since Dean was absolutely sure Cas was not talking about nipple play...”You want to touch my soul?”

“No. I’ve already done that when I rescued you from Hell.” Cas was taking his time, but it was no longer reluctance or mortification. He was coming clean - and Dean felt so proud of the guy unexpectedly. Like he’d reached across a huge abyss and Cas had reached out on his end and their hands had touched in the middle. Like they would be able to _get_ each other on a new level from now on. One with a lot less misunderstandings and assumptions.

“My Being has touched yours. My vessel has touched your body. What I can’t do is...” Cas glared at the hand on Dean’s chest, apparently wishing he could smite the English language for its limitations. Then he started again slowly. 

“You, Dean Winchester, have an immortal soul. But it doesn’t sit in your body like- like you sit in your car. You do not possess your body like I possess my vessel. Your mortal clay is a part of you. You shaped your body as you grew through experiences, accidents, and your training and skills. In turn this container has shaped your soul. One day you will die,” he said with all the bluntness one would expect from Cas. Or any angel. Or a Winchester, really. “You will lose that connection. The greatest part of you will remain the same and yet you _will_ change, because...”

“I’ll be a stiff?” Dean didn’t see where this was going. “I’ve died a few times, gone out of body too. I don’t know, it felt weirdly ‘not different’, if you know what I mean.” And it was a good thing he’d never bothered with life insurance. Wouldn’t that quick bio of Dean’s medical history look cool on the application, right alongside the big fat DENIED stamp.

“Your body is part of what shaped your soul - it shaped you into a tough, stubborn. very physical man with a strong residual self-image,” said Cas with a faint smirk - an oddly pleased expression that made Dean’s chest thrum. “Don’t misunderstand me, you will be the same. For the most part. Many would say you’ll be better, purer. But in another way...you will be less.”

Dean had a feeling he was going to need a glass of something with ‘%’ on the bottle soon. Or possibly an aspirin.

Cas deliberately pressed, slowly but with increasing strength, against Dean’s chest as if he wanted to push his way in - which he could do incidentally, but presumably would not without permission. Not if he didn’t want to lose his bed-warming privileges for the foreseeable future. Wait. Hadn’t Cas touched him like that on the chest a few times in the past weeks? Had he been contemplating this before?

“The eternal in me has already touched the immortal in you. I know your Soul. I know your body, I’ve touched it with my vessel, with my Grace every time I heal you.” Cas stared at his hand. “But this bridge between the two is beyond that level of interaction. This meshing between your body and your soul that is a part of what makes you _you_.”

Dean scratched his cheek, careful not to dislodge Cas’s hand with the movement. “O-kay?”

Cas was silent for a minute, then he said: “When angels touch, we...know each other. We can’t read each other’s minds, but we...feel each other’s shape, it’s instinctual. In much the same way you can look at a human and judge a hundred things about them with just a glance.”

“...I repeat: O-kay?”

”That’s what I want. To touch you, your body, like I would one of my Brethren, so I can _know_ this. Know _all_ of you.” 

“Huh...”

Cas took his hand away quickly. “I’m sorry. I told you you would not understand. That it would sound-“

Dean caught the hand and put it back firmly on his chest. “Yeah, yeah, don’t get your wings in a bunch. I think we’ve been around this block before, just in the other direction.”

Because Dean’s first split second reaction had been ‘huh’ followed by ‘You just want to feel me up? That’s no big deal, why were you so embarrassed?’

He’d actually opened his mouth to say it, but his brain, which was overclocking after all the healthy airing out it had previously gotten, kicked in with a visual of Cas calmly saying that he’d be okay having sex with Dean, like he didn’t see what the fuss was about. A tiny part of Dean had already been surprised and a tad taken aback by that - though he’d quickly assumed it was because Cas’s casual ‘sure!’ made his own half a decade worth of hesitation look completely pathetic by comparison.

On the face of it, sure, it didn’t sound like anything to get excited about. No mind-reading, soul-o-scopy, or magical hanky-panky, just a touch? It’d be like a human unable to see, given leave to sweep his fingers over a loved one’s face; perfectly natural and nothing to feel ashamed of wanting. But that was the human point of view, and that was not looking at it in the right context. To an angel, it was apparently quite shocking to even contemplate. Maybe because it involved the ‘clay’, as Cas put it, and angels were supposed to be all about the soul and only the soul. Come to think of it...it’d make the casual elimination of three billion people ‘acceptable collateral’ if you didn’t think of them as three billion diverse wonderful living breathing beings with rheumatism, pleasure centers, friends, hair, families, acid reflux and an obsession with shoes, but only saw them as three billion candy wrappers around the chocolaty soul-prize inside. Actually _caring_ about their bodies, the subtle link between inside and out, admitting that there was something unique there that would be lost when they died...yeah, maybe Dean could sort of see it now, and he was also a bit worried about Cas’s world-view if he went down this rabbit hole. 

Then again, Cas had molotoved Michael to give those three billion people the slimmest of chances; he was already a lost cause on that front. Now he just wanted to know what he’d been fighting and dying for all this time. Touch a human like an angel...Dean could just imagine the Host getting its collective panties in a twist at the very thought. 

Fuck them, though. This didn’t concern them. This wasn’t about theology or celestial rules and regs. Cas didn’t want to feel up just any human, he wanted to know Dean. Like, biblically - and not used as an euphemism for once. He’d said he wanted to know _all_ of him, and that little word hadn’t been lost on Dean. He knew this, he recognized that little touch of greed, of possessiveness that was the flip side of desire and love...

Still didn’t mean all that much on the human side of things. Of all the kind of sexy talk, ‘touch me like a brother’ would not rank among the top ten. Thousand. But Dean could still kind of see what Cas was aiming for now. He could also see the objection.

“If you - the, er, angel part of you, reaches out to touch me - aren't my eyeballs going to flame out?”

“That is one of the obstacles, yes,” said Cas a bit dryly.

“Awesome.”

Cas stared at his hand on Dean’s chest and was utterly still. The way only he could be still. The way only a creature that had put its vessel on Standby mode while it had deep deep thoughts five dimensions away could be still. Yeah, my life is totally weird, Dean thought, and I pity the poor bastards who don’t have my problems. 

“There are obstacles. They may not be insurmountable.”

“Oh?” There’d been a tacit question in that last word, Dean realized. “Oh. Oh yeah? Well then what are we waiting for?”


	6. Why Norway?

Operation Angel Groping - as Dean termed it even when Cas asked him not to - didn’t happen immediately because Cas needed to do some research on wards, containment seals and planar immersion (‘Huh?’ thought Dean, followed by ‘okay, he knows what he’s doing.’). More importantly, Garth finally turned up.

Weeks ago, an initial search for the guy showed he’d gone into hiding, lending credence to the theory that he’d gone off the reservation. Sam and Dean had had aching conversations trying to decide what to do about it. They could find him fast and easy if they dropped a dime to the hunter community. They’d find him fast, easy and dead. But if they said nothing, they’d be responsible for every corpse the monster that had once been their friend racked up.

In the end they kept it on the down low. Garth was their buddy and they owed him to find out what was what, and if the inevitable had to be done, then they owed it to do it themselves.

Dean rethought that decision almost every day and he was ready to bet Sam did too, until a case of cattle mutilation with a familiar suspect flashed up on the radar, and it was off to Wisconsin. 

Which turned out to be a new experience.

...Fundamentally speaking, Dean was going to buy the idea of a pacifist religious werewolf like he was going to buy the idea of Naomi being into topless beaches and pina coladas. But he was damn relieved to learn that their decision to not hunt Garth down the hard way had not cost any humans their lives.

As for the loony zealots in that particular church, a few silver bullets did for the lot of them, which was good. Better yet, Dean got a look at Garth’s step-mom’s face right before he shot her and right after Cas informed her Fenris had been killed by a human hero during the middle ages and that Odin had been killed by Lucifer, so Ragnarök was pretty much a non-starter. 

Once the fun was had, the bodies burned and Garth and the missus had stopped shaking, the brothers had a bit of time to sit down with him and visit (or in Dean’s case, paranoically watch every other member of the ‘flock of wolves’ to be sure this was real and not some elaborate scam.)

That’s how Garth and Sam together found Kevin. 

Sort of. They didn’t find his location, but they found a way of contacting him electronically, because angels of the lord didn’t know IRC from a hole in the ground, and had been stupid enough to leave Kevin a laptop and an internet connection.

Turned out Kevin did not want to be rescued. 

That burned a bit, but remembering some of the highlights of their interaction with the young prophet, Dean had to concede that maybe getting abducted by Winchesters to get locked back in a bunker would not be a good fourth of July present for the Trans.

Sam philosophically worked with Kevin to set up a system of tracking, dead-drops and automated warning messages. Like that, if the celestial watch detail screwed up and something did happen to Kevin or his mom, the Winchesters would have a chance to rescue them. Kevin went with this wholeheartedly once he’d gotten Dean on Skype and made him solemnly promise to only use it in case of break-the-glass levels of fucked up.

They’d been either on the road, on Kevin’s tracks, working to set up the warning system, or sleeping like the dead in between all that. Dean hadn’t forgotten Cas’s little research project, but he hadn’t had time to ask about it, and knew damn well he would not be able to contribute anyway. What he could do was not distract his angel in the meantime, or get handsy. 

Not that Cas would mind if Dean dragged him off to bed again. Never at any time had there been any notion of tit-for-tat here, it had never been said that Dean had to indulge Cas’s little kink before he got his own on again. In fact Cas would certainly be wholly put out at the very thought, which was why Dean didn’t tell him. But for his part, he felt like this was the order in which things had to go. It was like a bargain they’d spat and shook on. Even if, really, this whole thing might turn out to take a long time to set up, or maybe even be impossible, which would be another problem altogether.

Once the situation with the Trans had been settled, Dean had a good night’s sleep. A full night’s sleep in which a small knot of tension had finally eased, now that he knew where both Garth and Kevin were on the map. Maybe Cas deliberately let him have that, or maybe it was just coincidence that the very next morning - at the usual ungodly hour of please-kill-me-now o’clock - Cas stared Dean awake and told him he had ‘solved a few problems’, and it was apparently go time if Dean was still up for it.

 

\---

 

“So Sam, you’re okay manning the bunker by yourself for a bit?” Dean asked, leaning in at the kitchen doorway an hour after lunch. “Cas and I need some fresh air. We’re going to go for a drive. We might be gone a few hours, maybe ‘till tonight. Don’t wait up in that case.”

His attempt at casual was about as successful as if he’d used a warning klaxon along with it. Sam’s head lifted from his laptop like it was on ball bearings and he stared at his brother unblinkingly.

“Why?”

“I just told you, we’re popping out for awhile. Bunker fever, you know? There’s leftovers in the fridge if you want to nuke yourself some dinner later. ”

His second attempt at casual resulted in Sam closing his laptop with a firm click and crossing his hands over it like a judge.

“What. Are you two. Getting up to.”

“I’m taking some food,” said Cas walking right past both brothers and heading to the pantry, completely unaware of the atmosphere in the room. “You will be hungry at some point.”

“Um. Sam, it’s...” Yeah, casual was going to cut it like a butter knife cut Leviathans. Plan B. Dean sauntered into the kitchen, plonked his elbows on the back of a chair and winked. “Dude, you really wanna know?”

Sam stared at him,

Dean sighed and rolled his eyes. “We’re heading out together, so what do you think it’s about? Gonna take Baby along some little-trodden paths, put some make-out music on...How long has it been since you got laid, if I have to go and spell it out?” 

From the corner of his eye, he saw Cas go still with a couple of apples in his hand, but Sam wasn’t looking in that direction.

Sam’s mouth pinched and he looked super suspicious, which was the opposite of what Dean was going for.

“You guys are _not_ going to do something really dangerous and stupid without even telling me. Are you?”

“What did I just say-“

“Are you going after Abaddon?”

“What?! No!”

“After Kevin? We agreed to leave him alone-“

“No!”

“Dean,” said Sam, still unblinking. “There is no way you’d be that flip about it with me - especially not with Cas right here too. The only reason you’re saying that is because you’re doing something you _really_ don’t want me to know about and you’re hoping I’ll get embarrassed and stop poking. And to go so low as to casually throw ‘sex’ around, I’m really starting to wonder how much lower you’re going. So _spill!_ ”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Cas was looking at him over Sam’s shoulder with a steady stare of his own that suggested Dean was doing something he mildly disapproved of and for all the wrong reasons.

...It was hard living with two guys who knew him so well.

Then Cas pulled up alongside Dean and said, “We are going to Norway.”

“Norway?!” said both brothers - in much the same tone, which got Sam staring suspiciously at Dean all over again.

“We’ll be gone for twelve hours at the most. We are not doing anything really dangerous, and we are not going into battle.”

“There, you believe the angel, right?” Dean said, then glanced sideways. “Uh, Cas, do we have to leave the US?”

“Yes,” said Cas and without breaking stride he continued - even though Sam would have _believed_ him and he could have just stopped _right there_. “Your brother and I are going to spend some time alone together. You’re right, we’re not going to have sex. We need a safe place where we can gain new insight into what we share. I’m hoping I can understand Dean at a different level than-” and at this point Dean made a noise like a cat getting strangled, which interrupted the guy.

Sam’s eyes slowly went wide. 

There was a little silence while Sam stared at Cas and Cas examined Dean inquisitively and Dean’s gaze flinched to and from his brother to the kitchen cabinets, which had nothing to contribute at this point.

Sam took a deep breath and looked apologetically at Dean. “Yeah. I see why you went with ‘sex’.”

Dean muttered something even he couldn’t make out, now glaring at the microwave. Though he agreed with Cas’s overall ‘no more lies between the three of us’ decision _in theory_ , he needed to schedule yet another ball-breaking talk with his lover about what constituted serious shit that needed airing out and what was TMI.

“Well...uh...good luck with the, er, couple’s retreat. I guess.” Sam quickly opened his laptop and lowered his head ridiculously low to get the screen to hide his face and stuffed his hand over his mouth, but couldn’t quite muffle the hysterical snigger.

“If you need either of us, you can pray to me,” said Castiel solemnly, putting a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “I will hear you, though it might take me- are you alright, Sam?”

“Fine,” said Sam in a strangled voice. “You guys go.”

“Very well.”

“Don’t forget the patchouli and the talking stick.”

“Bite me!” a red-faced Dean snapped but unfortunately Cas had already airlifted them away. 

And then they weren’t in Kansas anymore. 

 

Dean turned around on himself a couple of times - still not used to being in one place one second and a completely other place the next. When the transition was from the well-known bunker to an unknown outdoor location, the jolt was even greater.

They were on a small island, Dean determined quickly; a mere fifty feet by a hundred, sloping towards the sea at one end, but a good thirty feet above the water where they stood. The air smelled briny with a crisp undertone of rocks, dirt and grass. The coastline was only a hundred yards away, a ragged series of cliffs and ravines that looked like someone had taken a cosmic cheese grater to it. It was pretty enough, though Dean could think of places like this on the coast not far from Portland, so they could have stayed in the US of A where Winchesters belonged. 

The small island had only one structure on it, a brick-and-board lighthouse. Not massive, about three stories high, and it didn’t look to be in use. From where he stood, Dean could see that the top where the lamps and mirrors should be was empty. 

Overhead a seagull made an ungodly screech. 

“So why are we here?” Dean asked, following the bird with his eyes in case it was some kind of freaky European shape-shifter - or in case it doubled back to dive bomb them. Dean had a gun holstered in the back of his jeans belt and was not afraid to use it.

Cas had been looking around as if quietly enjoying the view. “I found this place awhile back. The man who lived here was a recluse. He died intestate five years ago. Nobody knows this place is here, and nobody owns it, so I have restored it and made use of it.”

“Made use of it how?”

“I needed some place I could properly ward. Somewhere other than the bunker and its existing protections.”

“And there weren’t any abandoned shacks in America? Because if you’d asked me, I could have found you a dozen in a three hour drive radius from Lebanon.”

There was a minimal shrug beneath the trench coat. “I needed somewhere with a solid structure, and that could not be interfered with by mortals. This place is extremely isolated. The hamlet this lighthouse was originally built for no longer exists, the shipping lanes don’t pass near here. The nearest humans are currently...” Cas turned his head to the right a few degrees, “over fifty kilometers away, their village is even further. They’re catching the evening tide for night fishing.”

“If you say so.” Dean could have found him extremely isolated shacks in Kansas, but whatever. Then professional reflex kicked in, prompted by the sense of isolation and the sun slowly dipping towards the cloud-ringed horizon. “Are there any monsters here?”

“Yes.”

“Weird Norwegian ones?”

“No, much the same as the ones you are familiar with.” Cas’s eyes went blank as he stared at the coast. “This was not always the case. Terrifying creatures roamed here once. There was a spatial fracture into a dimension of chaos just over there.”

Dean’s wide eyes went from the stretch of coast a hundred feet away that Cas had pointed to, and then back to the house behind them. 

“And this is where you chose your love shack?”

Cas shook his head. “That gate is now closed.”

“And I didn’t have to kick it shut? Amazing. When did all this go down?”

“Not that long ago. A few thousand years. Tribes of humans had already settled further inland to the south. Some of the creatures were incorporated into their folklore.”

“...Bloody yesterday then.”

“It was one of the last great battles of that epoch.” Cas hadn’t apparently heard him and his eyes were distant. “We fought off the last incursion of the creatures of that realm and closed the gate. My flight and I drew watch duty on the rift right about here. We watched for almost a thousand years, and in that time only one thing moved. A chunk of the coast that was damaged by the fighting detached and fell into the ocean. It was interesting to watch.”

Only because the rest was so boring, Dean judged, feeling dizzy at the time lapse. 

“Where did it fall from?” Looked like every inch of this coast had been kicked around.

“Right over there.” Cas pointed straight over the water at the nearest stretch of ragged cliffs.

“Uh. Hit the water, huh?”

“The part that broke away? You’re standing on it.”

“...Oh.”

“It made a big splash.”

“I bet it did.” Dean searched Cas’s profile, trying to read him. Being stuck here for a thousand years would have driven Dean batty, but if Cas had stumbled upon the lighthouse fairly recently and decided to use it now, it would suggest he’d come back to visit this place again for his own reasons in the past few years. Nostalgia? Was this a good memory?

Cas gave the coast one last look and turned towards the lighthouse. Dean followed, fingering the demon killing knife in its hidden scabbard. Not that they were going to get jumped by eldritch Norwegian monsters. Right. 

Dean blinked as he followed Cas into the lighthouse. When Cas said he’d ‘restored’ it, he wasn’t kidding around. It probably looked exactly like it did when its owner died. Not a speck of dust, there were carpets on the concrete floor and furniture and beddings, everything. And-

“Didn’t you say this place was deserted? Why’s the stove hot?” Dean asked tightly, fingers still on the knife hilt as he noted the faint heatwave coming off the large iron stove to one side. 

“I came here earlier today to light it. It can get cold here.”

“Isn’t it summer here too?”

“Yes, we’re still in the Northern hemisphere.”

“I knew that,” Dean grumbled. Though the air had felt awfully crisp outside.

Dean turned his back to the stove and looked around. It was all one room. The previous owner had gutted the interior, leaving only a railing ladder to get to the top where the old signal apparatus used to be. Maybe Dean had gotten too use to the bunker, but it wouldn’t have been his choice to have that large echoing space over his head, he’d have thrown in a ceiling at the one-floor mark. Would have added storage space too- though didn’t look like the previous owner had had much in the way of belongings. This space now, it must have been a bitch to heat - and Dean didn’t know that much about Norway but he had the vague notion they had winters that’d put Alaska to shame. The small door off to one side must lead to the bathroom. It’d be slapped onto the far side of the round lighthouse structure - and hopefully it wasn’t a hole in the ground. Not if they were staying here for up to twelve hours.

There was a bed, not even a double, off against one wall, all nice and made up. The whole place was finished with an old-fashioned wooden design, fretwork around the windows, and the stove was beautiful, a large comforting presence in wrought ironwork. Dean replaced the word ‘recluse’ with ‘rich eccentric Howard Hugues figure’. 

The inside of the lighthouse was kind of cool, granted, but the doorway and windows were two inches too small in the eyes of someone who’d worked in construction, the furniture didn’t have the right proportions, there were actual board shutters on the _outside_ of the windows instead of rational blinds on the inside, the table near the stove was a bit lower than it should be and couldn’t fit more than two small people and there was no TV. It just felt very European, all told. 

Dean decided to shut up about it. Dean Winchester knew his strengths and failings. Strength: he was awesome in the sack, as a whole four score and ten women (and a few dudes) could attest, and that was just for the 2013/2014 season. Failing: he wasn’t very good boyfriend material, as the _one_ woman who could say otherwise had had to have her mind wiped - and the one guy he was currently involved with was an overly blunt angel, so Dean hoped nobody would ever ask him. But knowing was half the battle, as the PSAs would say. So Dean could try. And since it was obvious - in non-obvious ways because Cas had two and a half facial expressions at his command all told - that Cas really liked this island, this coast and this house, Dean would be an utter bag of rats to say anything against it. 

His fingers lingered near the open zipper of his jacket as he started to shrug it off. “Uh, we’re safe here, right?” Stupid question, surely, but-

Cas smiled ever so faintly and made a gesture.

The interior was decently lit by the slanting late evening light pouring through the small windows, yet it seemed to dim into twilight as dozens of symbols lit up on the walls sequentially like neon switching on, their light turning the whole place into a mishmash of colors and shadows.

“Oh. Yeah. You said you’d been prepping this place.” Dean kicked his rear in gear and slipped off his jacket, dropping it on the chair near the table. He drew his piece, checked the security automatically and slipped it into the pocket, then toed off his boots, since it was kinda nice and warm in here, and the throw rugs looked very woolly and inviting underfoot. Three of them were actual sheepskins. 

Dean clapped his hands...and realized he had absolutely no frigging clue as to what was supposed to follow.

The lighted symbols were still casting an eerie light around the house. Cas had fished two sets of candles in simple holders from a cupboard and placed them on the table and a nearby shelf, lighting them with a wave of his hand. This far north, it’d be another hour or two before night officially fell, but it’d get dark as soon as the sun hit those clouds. Dean couldn’t see a single light bulb, it seemed this place didn’t have a generator. This guy had been a hardcore hermit, had to give him that. Mojo and candlelight it was, then. How...romantic? Dean wondered if that thought had gotten to within a mile of Cas, and decided it probably hadn’t.

“So what do you need me to do?” Dean clapped his hands again just to hear the way it echoed in the space above.

Cas was tossing some more wood pellets into the stove. “Sit on the bed, in the middle. Take off your shirt. And t-shirt.”

“Oh, now it gets interesting.” Dean strode towards the bed in his socks and sat down with a bounce. “Need me to do it sloooow?”

Cas gave him a curious head tilt from over by the stove. “No. Any speed is acceptable.” 

He closed the stove’s door, looked around the room once, then headed towards Dean who was tossing his t-shirt with astounding aim (why be modest) on top of an overturned tin tub standing near the stove. Probably the previous owner’s bathtub. No sign of where water came from - maybe the bathroom had a sink, and this place had a reservoir or worked with desalinating sea water. Dean almost asked but realized Cas was standing over him now, looking down at him with a measuring stare, and didn’t seem interested in giving him the grand tour.

The angel put one knee on the bed, then he seemed to hesitate. He shook his shoulders - and he was bare to the waist as well. 

Dean’s eyebrows made a spirited attempt to ascend all the way to Mount Hairline without stopping at base camp.

“That’s not what I thought we were here for. Not that I’m sayin’ no.”

Cas glanced down at his bare chest as if he needed his nipples to explain to him what Dean was referring to. “Oh. No. I thought it would be less visually confusing to you this way.”

“You’re going to have to draw me a diagram for that one.”

“That would be difficult. Unless I have several sheets of paper and you can hold three of them at different angles.”

“Sounds like trig class. Pass.”

Cas gave him an overly patient look, and Dean mentally smacked himself. That had not been what he’d meant to say.

“So. Paper. I didn’t bring any paper - unless you thought to? They got paper here? Or do they use wax tablets and shit?”

Cas stopped in his motion to settle down on his knees a foot away from Dean, and seemed to be contemplating which question to answer first.

Dean scrubbed them all away with an irritated motion of his hand. “Never mind, never mind.”

Cas looked even more confused now, apparently not sure how to continue. “Dean...if you have questions-“

Dean cracked his knuckles, glancing around at the interior sparkling like an inside-out Christmas tree. “No, I don’t- Cas, let me get one thing straight. I’m just a tiny little bit-” nervous, “outside of my regular wheelhouse here. That makes me-” babble, “shoot my mouth off. Just ignore it, nothing personal.”

Cas gave him that look that went right through him.

“Dean,” he started to say gently, “if at any time-“

“Stopping you right there.” Dean held out a peremptory palm. “If this is going to be a replay of my speech of ‘I can back out whenever I want no harm no foul’ that I gave you when we first hit the sheets, then take it as a given.”

“...It was, though it would have been more clear and concise,” said Cas a tad dryly..

“Hey, that speech was awesome. That speech was Oscar-worthy. Sam’s would have been three times as long and he would have broken down crying halfway through. So what now?”

Cas closed his eyes. “I need to trigger a few seals. It will take me a minute.”

“Oh. We safe here, right? I already asked that.” Fuck, Dean was trying to _not_ sound like a choir boy about to lose his virginity here. 

“We are extremely safe.” Cas’s mouth had curled up at the corners a trifle. “I put in every warding sigil I could think of around this part of the island. The lighthouse itself is set up to contain my energy to further isolate us. You are probably safer here than in the bunker.”

“When angels put up the Do Not Disturb on the motel door, they mean it. Was that necessary or are you just being a little overprotective? Do I need to shut up so you can concentrate?” Dean cracked his knuckles again. Despite the warmth, his back was goosepimpling. 

Once again that barely there smile, definitely amused. “You can talk, I can still work.” Of course he could, bloody angel brains. “All these layers are required for safety. I hope you don’t mind, Dean, but I will have to take the warding off your ribs for awhile.”

Dean blinked down at his chest. “Okay? Fine by me, but why?”

“Because I need to know where you are.”

“Uh...pretty sure I’m right here.” Dean gave a wave and resisted the urge to reach over and poke. “You’re a foot away.”

“My vessel is,” Cas answered distantly, eyes still closed. “But this is going to involve my greater Being.”

Because of course a critter the size of a building had to have a good idea of where the human - the comparative size of a graham cracker - was at all times.

Dean licked his lips, gripped his hands together and mentally strangled a ‘you sure you know what you’re doing here?’ Of course Cas knew what he was doing.

_Because Cas never makes mistakes, right?_

Fuck, that part of his brain was back. Of course it was. And to answer that question, inner-voice-of-feel-free-to-shut-the-fuck-up, Cas made mistakes with moral decisions - more often than not with the very best intentions - but when it came to being a mother hen for Winchesters, he pulled double duty. If Cas was comfortable with this-

_Hopefully he’s better at thinking with his upstairs brain even when getting his kink on, or at least better than I am._

Hey, I’m always careful. 

_True, it’s been at least two years since I managed not to father any crazy amazon women. Give me a W, give me a I, give me a-_

“Dean?”

“Revved and raring,” Dean bit out. “Expression, Cas,” he added in response to the blank look. “Means I’m ready.”

“Ah.”

Cas rubbed his palms together and proceeded to look very hesitant, which didn’t do much for Dean’s give-it-hell attitude.

“I really feel...I can try to explain this to you again, Dean-“

“Dude, you tried that this morning, remember? You lost me at ‘multi-wave’, and that was five words in.”

“I could try to simplify-“

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But...” Cas’s expression twisted. “I feel...as if I should get your informed consent on this. I-“

“Oh don’t you dare.”

Cas blinked. Twice. ”...get your informed consent?”

“Get all ‘I got to explain everything I’m doing to you’. Not after you practically gagged me the first time we hooked up and I was just trying to broach the matter of safe sex and lube.”

“But I knew what I was doing from observation-“

“The conversation we had a couple of weeks ago would suggest you did _not_ fully grasp anything other than the basics, bub.”

”...I...suppose I see what you mean. But by your own reaction, that was perhaps not the right attitude to have.”

“I didn’t say that. If we’d stopped to overthink it back then, we’d never have screwed and that’d be a shame,” Dean pointed out with a leer and a lingering look at Cas’s bare chest (because damn, never getting tired of that.) “You already told me what you’re going to do - feel me up in angel form - and I get some of the point behind this, and beyond that it’ll take a smarter guy than me to understand. But I trust you, man, so don’t overthink this now. C’mon Cas, let’s get this on.” Dean clapped his hands a few times, sparking echoes again. 

Cas gave him a steady, measuring look and then reached out. Dean strangled any hint of tension in his frame. He got his hands out of their sudden clench, loosened his shoulders, shook his arms a tad- realized that he still had no idea of what the mechanics were here. 

Cas touched two fingers to each side of Dean’s torso. Dean felt an odd scritchy-numb sensation deep inside, barely there.

“Wards on the ribs,” Dean muttered, half a question half an affirmation. “Do I need to shut up? Sit real still?” 

Either Cas finally got the undertone of “please give me some traction in this” in Dean’s words or else he really meant it when he said, “Don’t tense up, try to sit still and don’t move your head too much, it could make you dizzy. Other than that, you’re fine. I’ve carefully thought this through, you are in no danger.”

“I know that,” Dean scoffed as if the idea hadn’t begun to cross his mind. “Don’t tense, sit still, don’t move my head. I can do that. Wait- I thought you said I wouldn’t see anything. You said you had, er, filters or something.” To prevent the eyeball-flame-out which would not be the ideal end to any date.

Cas had a look of concentration on his face, his hands were hovering just over the spots he’d touched a few seconds ago. “Your senses are going to be protected, yes. Obviously. But you won’t be blind or deaf. You will perceive some things. I think it will be confusing though. I’m sorry. You can close your eyes if you find that helps. You will tell me if you feel distressed. You will tell me right away.” That double-down had been added with a penetrating stare which did not relent until Dean had nodded.

Cas rubbed his palms together and closed his own eyes. 

Dean waited, battling an odd feeling inside. Not nerves, oddly enough. It had just occurred to him...he’d been all gung-ho about having a set of magical shades on or whatever, since melted eye jelly was not on his to-do list, but now he suddenly realized that he was not going to see Cas. For obvious safety reasons, of course, of course. 

He loved this guy like it’d replaced every bone in his body with that feeling, that solid pull towards him, that _need_ that had only gotten stronger since he’d faced it and they’d hooked up...and he would never actually see Cas’s face, his real face, or be able to touch him in return. The feeling he was trying to tamp down, before Cas touched him and picked up on it, was a defuse kind of sadness. Normally the differences between them were crazy or fun, or crazy-fun, but right now it just seemed...like a huge gap.

Cas opened his eyes and gave him a look that clearly spelled out, “Ready?” Dean nodded.

Cas closed his eyes again. Still kneeling, he reached out and put fingertips on Dean’s bare chest. Dean blinked down at them. Cas moved his shoulders forward slowly, almost as if he were pushing through something thick, until his palms were also resting on Dean’s chest. Dean looked at him uncertainly- something flickered out of line of sight. 

Despite instructions, Dean tensed. To be more precise, Dean jumped like someone had taken a shot at him and he would have been off the bed the next second if his self-control hadn’t smashed down on his spine and _gripped_. 

Cas didn’t tell him off, didn’t even seemed to have noticed.

Dean forced himself motionless with the cold clarity and clenched teeth with which he’d forged a path of death and destruction through Purgatory. His eyes flickered around, despite Cas’s advice, because there was only so far Dean was going to disarm. What had he seen? It kept flickering out of line of sight-

Oh...

After three gob-smacked seconds, Dean finally realized why Cas kept drying up this morning when trying to explain what he was going to do. The English language really wasn’t up to the task...

Half of Dean’s body and senses could have sworn he was still sitting cross-legged on the bed in a lighthouse and that nothing had changed.

The other half just informed him that the lighthouse, the island and the bed had come apart like Russian nesting dolls and were now hovering a few hundred yards away from each other.

The sensation was _not_ distressing - thanks, Castiel, for suggesting he could get ‘distressed’ like some quivering jello, he’d been to hell and back, there was nothing gonna distress Dean Winchester in fucking Norway. But the feeling was disorienting and unexpected. 

But what completely bowled him over - a soft “Whoa” escaping him - was...

Maybe he’d not be able to get a glimpse of his lover’s real face. But he could see the next best thing. He could see Cas’s Wings. 

Dean’s down-to-earth burger-munching head-scratching senses saw their clear shadow on the wall, in that strange lighting from the wards. Just like in a barn when they’d first met ages ago.

But the part of Dean that was getting a glimpse behind the curtain could see them a lot more clearly. Drifting out from behind Cas - maybe that’s why he said it’d look less confusing without a shirt on? They were spread out in a loose stretch - fucking wings! With all the- the wing articulations and bones and _feathers!_ If they were fully stretched out, Dean guessed they’d be about, oh, twelve to fifteen feet in length. Except. Except that Dean was a hunter and expert marksman, he could glance through a rifle scope and judge exactly how far something was from the faint feel of blur. That instinct was telling him the wings actually stretched a lot further than fifteen feet. More like several hundred yards. While still being _inside_ the lighthouse - and the right wing should in all normal-world logic be intersecting the wall right next to the bed (not that that meant much because the lighthouse had come apart in Dean’s perception like lego.)

Dean scrunched his eyes shut hard, hoping to align both sets of information. When he opened them again, it was still pretty much the same. Feathered shadows on the wall, moving a bit, small twitches just like a bird’s wings making tiny adjustments as it soared on air currents. And also a real goddamn wing with real goddamn feathers that was about fifteen feet and also a hell of a lot bigger, and all fitting inside the thirty feet of diameter of the lighthouse.

Distressed? Hardly! Dean found himself grinning because- what was that word that combined interesting, a little bit scary and completely nuts? Exhilarating, maybe...

...Actual freakin’ feathers. The ones closest to him (a foot away and also maybe fifty yards) were about the size of his forearm (and also thirty feet long _at the very same time_ ). They rippled and flowed as if being born aloft on a stiff wind. Their shape was different than a bird’s feather, though Dean had a hard time putting his finger on it; wider than expected for their length, and the ends split in an odd way, forking out while something fluffy and white seemed to flicker at the tip to sharpen them to a point. They were a smoky dark gray with little silvery highlights. And at the very same time they were also a white so pure and harsh they were almost a faint electric blue.

“So this must be what it feels like to get high,” Dean snorted. He’d always stuck to booze as his poison of choice. 

His voice sounded muffled in his own ears. Everything sounded muffled. He had the feeling he should be hearing something, though; maybe the wind those wings were catching and soaring on. Wind blowing past him as if he were falling out of an airplane.

Prickles on his skin reinforcing that same impression. Like he was falling out of a plane while wreathed in bubble wrap. 

Dean grabbed his focus by the scruff of the neck to get it away from _that_ image. He fastened his attention on the feathers instead. Or tried to. Every time he focused on one, he seemed to be looking at the next instead. And the next. And the next-

\- a hand touched him briefly on the shoulder and Dean realized he’d been leaning to the right and had almost overbalanced off the bed.

Cas, eyes still closed, walked his hand back across Dean’s chest to join the other on his pecs as if he were navigating a long distance.

The gray (silver white blue) feathers had an odd bristly look about them. Like there was some extra structure to the little feather-bits off the central shaft. What was that called? It was easier to focus on the left wing than on anything else, but he was aware of stuff moving on the periphery of his vision, shadows. Huge shadows. _Not_ shadows, rather, something really really bright-

Everything felt muted, fuzzy, his own movements as he turned his head were slow. His brain was insisting that all this should feel dreamlike and yet he’d never felt more wide awake, which made the sensations so real they prickled his nerves.

Then his vision went completely haywire - everything blurred and there was just three bars of light visible and moving (even though he could still see Cas in front of him and the lighthouse and the stove-)

Cas said - _gasped_ \- “Dean!” - and there was no way to describe what Dean heard just outside the cusp of his hearing, though a sudden ache in his ears like depressurization made him flinch.

Dean jerked on instinct - or maybe Cas had pushed him a bit. He was falling straight back towards the mattress, Cas’s palms still pressed to his chest. 

\- Dean was falling _really falling as if out of a plane_ \- backwards yet he was also motionless for the briefest moment as if something held him safe...

And then his back hit the mattress with a perfectly prosaic thump. Cas was leaning forward so he could still keep his palms against Dean’s chest - he’d not been that close before, yet he was right up against Dean now, his legs still in the same kneeling position. The strangest thought went through Dean’s head, ‘Now I know how he can move around like that’. Dean would eventually wake up with that thought over the coming nights and try to figure out exactly what he’d realized or made sense of right that minute, and it would always be just out of reach...

And then Dean Winchester was blinking up at his lover in a lighthouse in Norway, back flat on the bed, legs still half crossed, arms out and gripping bedding, and there was absolutely nothing weird going on anywhere. 

Cas was staring down at the palms he was still pressing flat against Dean’s chest.

Dean looked around carefully, in case he was missing something.

Though the experience had been intense and confusing, he had the impression it had lasted all of two minutes. If that. A glance at his watch on his wrist confirmed it.

A second glance more accurately confirmed that his watch was dead, the hand counting down the seconds standing in mute amazement on the dial’s face.

Dean looked up at Cas. “Uh...was that it?”

Cas slowly nodded.

“That was fast. We keep saying that. What, is that like our call sign now? If it is, we’re never telling Sammy.” Oh look I’m still shooting my mouth off...

Cas didn’t answer. He stared at the hands on Dean’s chest for a few long seconds, then blinked and shifted his weight a bit. The fingers rose, swept up to Dean’s cheek and forehead. Cas gazed into his eyes. What he saw there must have reassured him, because he touched Dean’s ribs - itchy scritchy feel once again as he presumably rewrote the part of the wards he’d previously broken. Then Cas sat back on his heels, something in his frame relaxing. 

“I need to double check the seals. Make sure my movements didn’t disturb them.”

Dean expected him to get up, but Cas just swung his feet off the bed and sat there with his hands clasped between his knees, staring off into space. Right, he probably didn’t need to physically get up and eyeball the markings.

Dean glanced surreptitiously down at his chest. Though he felt absolutely no pain, nothing wrong at all, yet he somehow expected to see two sets of burn-red hand prints over his pecs. There was, of course, absolutely nothing there, just his anti-possession tattoo. He stopped his hand from lifting up to touch, because he was worried Cas might wig out. 

“So, uh, did you get what you need? I mean, saw what you wanted to?” 

Cas turned his head slowly and looked at him just long enough to be awkward, and then he nodded once. There was an odd air about him, an indecipherable corner smile on his lips, which made Dean feel more naked than he’d ever had in his life. Naked and extremely _examined_. For a brief flash, it was like Dean’s view was still split, like he was back in that barn facing Castiel, an intense alien creature who looked like an accountant freshly fallen out of bed and felt like something infinitely more dangerous...and at the same time it was also, well, Cas, seen through years of memories, familiarity and affection. 

Dean sat up slowly, scrubbing his hair with his hand. He felt like he’d just ripped off a woolly sweater and was fighting static cling. He wrapped his arms around his knees and looked around, instinctively searching for shadows of feathers. He really did hope Cas had gotten what he wanted out of this, but as for Dean, that was what he would take away from the experience, that memory right there, that graceful - and also crazy large - left wing soaring completely weightless and elegant, feathers dragging Dean’s gaze far away...

He contemplated getting up; check out the bathroom, splash his face with water or something - and felt a deep abiding desire to just sit there instead. His body kept giving him confusing signals. It felt like he should know this feeling, it felt familiar but out of context. 

It took him a minute but he narrowed it down. This weird thrum in his muscles, this feeling of weighing more than usual, this intense desire to just curl up and sleep, coupled with an irritating wide-awake feel of five cups of coffee and a large bag of M&Ms...Dean had felt this before. It felt just like what happened after an injury - a dislocation, a bunch of stitches or a punch to the head. He’d not recognized it right away because of the complete lack of pain which normally overrode the base sensation, but that’s what it felt like. No pain, but his body informed him that it’d been through something there, and now it wanted good old Rest & Recovery before it would let him get up to anything else...unless he was willing to reach for the adrenaline and the fighting instincts and the life-or-death extremes. Then it’d put it on his tab and interest would be a real killer.

“What now? Are we going home?” They’d only been here thirty minutes tops.

“No,” said Cas, who had gone back to staring at the walls around them (some of the wards flickered and changed color as Dean watched.) “Take some time to rest. We need to...We need to stay here a few hours.” 

“Why?” Though Dean felt relieved, he didn’t even want to travel Angel Air right now.

“You have traces on you. Traces of Grace. Of me. It could send up signals to unwanted parties.”

There were at least five jokes to make there, four of them dirty, and Dean couldn’t be bothered. They could stay here? In this Fort Knox of a warded lighthouse? With an angel of the lord watching over him? Couldn’t get better than that for passing out. 

“Cool. I might just...uh, take a nap. You can keep first watch.” And second and third, most likely. “Wake me up if anything tries to eat us.”

He curled up on his side- shoot, should have gotten under the blankets

Then Cas was there, bare chest against Dean’s shoulder blades. His arms around Dean, hands resting over Dean’s loosely folded arms.

Cas would know- he’d pick up that wonky feeling from him. Dean didn’t want him to feel bad.

Cas didn’t say anything though, which was good, because Dean didn’t want to yak on about this being nothing compared to what he would have done to make his buddy happy - which would take going at lengths about paths of burning coal, trips to Purgatory, wrestling werewolves or anything else Dean could come up with. And he thought - he hoped - Cas would know that too. 

But he didn’t need to say anything, not really. He scootched back just enough to turn bare-upper-body contact to maximum-full-on-touching until Cas brought a leg forward to cover Dean’s. Dean twisted one hand to get it on Cas’s wrist, and let Cas cover every inch of him like a blanket. 

...hadn’t he done that to Cas, wrapped around him like that after the first time they’d had sex?

The thought trickled out and he could feel himself falling to sleep. He had a feeling he would dream of flying...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this is Dean's POV, you have to sort of guess (assuming that's even humanly possible) at what Cas was doing exactly during those two minutes, because Dean doesn't have a clue and couldn't see squat for the most part anyway. Next chapter is some 'pillow talk' (kinda sorta) and the chapter after that is back to our regularly scheduled smut, much to Dean's relief because _that_ he can get a handle on.


	7. Finger In The Pie

Dean woke up slowly and without much of an adrenaline jolt. Which produced a secondary shock (bloody contrary reflexes) because _not_ having Cas stare him awake at fuck-this o’clock was _wrong_.

But there was a dip in the bed next to him, a feel of warmth and presence. 

Dean cracked open an eye. Cas was where he was supposed to be, quite close in the small bed, on his side towards Dean, fully dressed under the blankets that had been mojoed over them at some point. But he wasn’t staring at Dean, he was looking at his own elbow. No, looking wasn’t the right word for it. It was like he was composing a PhD on the elbow in his head. Like he was carding through every elbow molecule with that fixed gaze of his.

It only lasted five seconds before he picked up on the fact that Dean was awake - five whole seconds for an angel was like hours of further elbow studying, though. Cas put down his arm and his stare returned to its usual alarm clock level of intensity as it settled on Dean’s pillow-mushed features. 

“What?” Dean said, then coughed and cleared his throat. “Got rheumatism?”

Cas gave him the usual puzzled look and followed Dean’s pointed stare at his elbow. “No. My joint is in perfect working order.”

“So why you staring?” 

Cas glanced down at his arm. “It’s ingenious. Though not as much as the knee and hip arrangement. Are you feeling alright?”

Was he? Dean blinked fuzzily.

“Are you hungry? I brought food.”

He tensed when Dean abruptly sat up. “I feel great and I could definitely eat.”

Dean’s watch was still benched, but according to the angel in the room, it was nearly three am local time, dinnertime in Kansas, and they should stick around for another hour or two before leaving. And yeah, Cas had brought food, Dean saw as he pulled on his t-shirt and shirt.

“Whoa! When did you get all this?” Dean was pretty sure they’d left Kansas with no more than a couple of apples. The apples were in a small ceramic bowl on the table. There was also coffee in a brown paper cup that Dean reached for before he was even sitting down. There was a large tasty looking sandwich cut in half on a ceramic plate, a bottle of water, and a whole pie, a fancy one with the criss-cross dough stripes over jam filling. 

Dean took a sip of coffee and made an internal bet with himself that Cas had made sure it was exactly the way Dean usually took it, down to the exact micro-gram of sugar he’d added to his coffee this morning. Since this java was about five times stronger than he was used to, he had to suppress a grimace. Not that it was bad, but Dean was used to diner coffee you could see through, and this was like a solid punch in the mouth by comparison. Still, Cas had produced this meal on an isolated coast at spitting distance from the polar circle, Dean wasn’t going to whine about it. And he’d brought pie. Dean would forgive a lot for pie.

Cas sat opposite Dean, his eye on the plate. “I went out for two minutes when I was sure you were asleep. I didn’t go far.”

That would explain why Cas was fully dressed. “Not far? You mean you found all this in that village fifty clicks away?”

“No, in Europe.”

“Right. Hop, skip n’ a jump,” Dean mumbled around his first bite of sandwich, which was as good as it’d promised. “Thanks.”

Cas nodded without looking up. 

Dean took another bite, giving Cas a bit of space just in case the angel spontaneously spilled out what was going on, rather than forcing Dean to ask, ‘So, any reason you decided on an awesome spread instead of a couple of fruit? Or that you’re sitting there with your head down instead of staring me in the eyeball for once?’

“Everything okay?” Dean finally asked, after coughing a bit and reaching for the bottle of water Cas had thoughtfully provided. He’d found a pickle in his sandwich. It was about as small as half a little finger and kicked like a playful mule.

Cas nodded. His eyes had flickered briefly to Dean’s and were now back on the provided meal. Dean sighed internally. Relationships were hard. Especially between two card-carrying members of the ‘communication is for chumps, real guys repress’ party.

Dean’s intuition suggested the direct approach would probably fail, so he decided to go fishing. “Wow. Norway, huh? You sure did an amazing job with this lighthouse. Was it hard to set up in the end? To do the research?”

“No. Not after studying angel warding with Sam. Some of the sigils on the walls are based on filters we use in Heaven to give human souls a visual framework-...It wasn’t as hard as I thought,” Cas concluded, correctly estimating Dean’s interest in the arcane details. 

“Cool. When we coming back here again?”

“Back?” 

“Yeah. We’ll be doing this again one day, right?”

Cas looked nonplussed. “No. Why would you think that?”

“C’mon Cas, you can’t have set all this up for a one-time use. Right?” Dean used his cup of beans to salute the intricate warding still sparkling all around them. Now that night had fallen outside, it was eerily beautiful, and quite enough light to see by with the candles on the table.

“I hadn’t considered it.” Cas glanced at the wards too with a hunch of his shoulders as if they were scowling down at him in reproach.

“Why not? It was interesting.” It could have been more so, but he’d been a bit too tense to fully grasp everything in the experience. Not that that was the point of the exercise, this had been for Cas’s benefit- oh wait. Was that the problem here?

Dean tongued a piece of ham out from between his molars and took a swig of coffee to wash it down. He could be on the wrong track here. Cas had said he’d gotten what he wanted out of the experience, and this was more about information gathering than, well, fun and games. Dean could be on the wrong track, but he was ready to bet he wasn’t.

“You want to do it again, you just don’t think I want to,” he said, licking mustard off his thumb. “So you’re not even going to put in the planner.”

Cas was silent. Dean didn’t even have to look to know the scrutiny he was under.

“I am very grateful that you allowed me this, Dean,” Cas started to say, and there was a tone of finality in the words that got Dean jumping in before the angel ran himself into a hole they’d have to dig him out of.

“For the record, I’m cool with coming back, but I’m betting you feel just a bit off about it anyway. ‘Cause you’re the only one getting anything out of it and that makes it feel wrong and almost like you’re taking advantage of me somehow. Am I right? Tell me when you get there, I’ll wait. Man this ham is good.”

There was an intense ten seconds of cogitation on the other side of the table, probably unrelated to ham. Dean could almost feel the inner wheels clicking. It ended when Cas finally looked Dean full in the eye with a gaze like a blowtorch. “How did you know-... as a mortal what I did here is beyond your comprehension, how could you know what I was thinking?”

“With my GED and my shoot-first-question-later attitude you mean?” Dean said with a unoffended shrug. “Think, dude. This is why I initially put the kibosh on sex. This...er, whatever you’d call it, let’s just call it Norway, okay? Well, I don’t get as much out of Norway as you do, but it was still interesting. I don’t mind it, I might get more out of it if we continue, and if nothing else I like that you like it. So, you know, with both sex and Norway on the table, we got something going here, right? Something we can work with. Make sense?”

“Yes.” A single simple word, but the look of comprehension, even a breath of wonder in his expression, suggested he was bouncing up and down inside yelling ‘It does make sense! Yatzhee!’ or whatever brainy people shouted when they figured things out.

“Hey, you’re a thousand times smarter than me, but don’t discount the human,” Dean drawled, brushing the crumbs of his dead and departed sandwich from his fingers. “Sure, this is mental gymnastics to me too sometimes, but you know what? Maybe you and me, we’re like chalk and cheese- or chalk and a radio wave, more like. But the same guy made us both ultimately, and I think he cribbed a bit. Just ‘cause it’s in different dimensions don’t mean we don’t think and feel the same way about a lotta stuff. We care about the same things in the end, we make the same mistakes - like that mess when you made that bid on Purgatory, right? D’you know how many humans have had their good intentions blow up in their faces when too much power gets in the mix? Even I know that and I slept through most of my history classes. At the end of the day, Heaven or Earth, we’re not that different, is all I’m saying. Humans just have a few billion generations of free will and screw-ups behind us to teach us how to see some of this crap coming ahead of time, which is the one area where we have a leg-up on your immortal unchanging angels, I guess.”

There was a huffed chuckle from the other side of the table and Cas’s eyes flickered up briefly. “I wish I could send that straight to my Brethren next time they call you monkeys.”

Dean grinned and reached for the pie.

“But, having a good grasp of how your choices might lead you astray, and your own father’s experience as a guideline, why then did you take that crossroad deal to bring back Sam when you must have known-“

“Some of us are slow learners.”

Dean used the demon killing knife- hey, he cleaned the thing - to slice out a generous portion of pie onto his plate. Also, time to lighten the mood, they were wandering into crap memory territory.

“So you got an actual pair of wings. Like, with feathers and all,” Dean said, leaving the table to go in search of a fork.

“I have Wings. I do not have feathers as you understand them.”

”Those were feathers.”

That earned Dean a faint smile as he made his way back from the kitchenette corner with his prize. “The shapes you saw are an imprint of my Grace on the higher planes. It is a fractal pattern, repeated inwards. If you could look at them closely enough, you would see I don’t have quills, or barbs coming off the quills. Both are a repeat of the overall Wing pattern on both sides of the-“

“Dude. Feathers.”

Cas scrutinized him as if wondering what Dean’s obsession with feathers was.

“It’s just so...birdy. If it’s all mojo, then why does your Grace look like a bird’s wing?” Dean asked, pointing the fork at a spot about four feet from Cas’s shoulder (heh, upper dimension or not, close enough).

That faint smile again, and a crinkling of eyes. Cas seemed to be enjoying this. “My Wings do not look like a bird’s.”

“Could have fooled-“

“A bird’s wings looks like mine. We’re not sure how this happened exactly. It took us a long time to notice the odd shape of integument certain theropods were developing. Some think it’s a form of natural selection. Our Grace takes that form because it’s very mathematically organized and nature tends to adopt shapes for the same reason. Others believe it was a gift. From our Father.”

”...Make a cheap non-magical knock-off and paste it onto critters with brains the size of postage stamps? Sounds like the asshole god we know and love.”

“I prefer the mathematical explanation,” Cas said ironically.

“All the hot women I hit on in my time and I end up snagging someone with a pair...of wings,” Dean said with a wicked grin, knowing the nature of the pause and the joke would be lost on his audience.

Cas, all serious and informative, explained he had six wings. Six! Unless one considered them with a different mindset than dimensional planes, in which case he could be said to only have a single pair. And he went on more about fractures or fractals or whatever. There was a hint hovering in the air. ’Next time we do this, maybe I’ll find a way to show you what I mean’. Dean was going to hold him to that ‘next time’ even if he had to put the stubborn seraph in an arm-lock to do so. 

Dean forked in a mouthful of pie, which was not as sweet as he was used to, but hot damn, hello flavor. Cas was sketching out something really nerdy about dimensions on the table, and perspective, and positional variables changing the nature of what was observed. His gaze rose to the pie on the plate, then he solemnly examined the thumb Dean had hiked up in pastry-related approval. Cas smiled, and Dean was never going to get tired of that. 

The blue eyes settled on the plate again.

“It would make more sense if you were a dolphin,” Cas said. “Echolocation when born to move freely in a three dimensional environment allows for a better extrapolation of higher planes.” Then he stuck out a finger, scooped up a smear of the jam filling left by the fork and put it in his mouth. 

Dean sat there with his coffee in hand, almost choking on the liquid going down.

“Dude?”

Cas had a distant introverted expression on his face. Dean’s verbal prod made him blink and look at him steadily, his equivalent of Yes?

“Uh...”

Castiel followed Dean’s glance down at the pie, then up at Dean, looking faintly puzzled, which should have been Dean’s gig. 

“Er, why’d you just sample my pie?”

A small tip of tongue darted over Cas’s lower lip - throwing the switches on Dean’s train of thought momentarily. Then the angel said: “An experiment.”

“Uh. Explain?”

Cas looked like he was focusing in slowly on the conversation. He was silent a moment, staring blindly at his finger.

“It is...interesting.” Just as Dean was about to whine for elaboration, his angel continued. “When I saw the connection between your soul and your body...it’s hard to explain. I’m not sure I fully understand it myself. Nothing’s changed, I can still see every response to stimuli in my vessel down to the neurochemical exchanges and enzymatic reactions. But.”

Only Cas could make that last word sound like an entire phrase. Dean, knowing something else was coming, waited somewhat patiently (after gathering up his pie protectively against his chest and grabbing his fork again).

Cas’s eyes were on the movement of fork to mouth, though he didn’t seem fully aware of it. “Now I can see a...connection between these sensations and...Hm. To simplify: I have a better grasp of mortal senses. I...have a new...integrity with my vessel. From observing the way your body and senses connect to your inner being. This was not an outcome I had anticipated.”

“Oh?”

“No.”

“But it’s good?” Dean hazarded, because he was damned if he could figure it out from Cas’s reaction to date.

“It’s...interesting,” Cas repeated, suggesting he wasn’t sure either. 

Dean gestured at the rest of the pie. “Want me to cut you a slice?” 

Cas stared at him as if the question surprised him and was patently a bit silly. “I don’t eat.”

“Well, not usually, but-“

“I had to eat back during the Apocalypse, when my Grace was completely exhausted. I was- that is, the vessel was hungry and I didn’t have the energy to fix it. Jimmy was still my host then, I did not want him to suffer. So I ate one of the meals they brought me at the hospital. It is not a good memory.” Cas’s nose wrinkled faintly. “Neither was what Famine did to me, though in that case I had the power to cleanse my vessel immediately afterwards.” 

“Fair enough,” said Dean. “How do you like the pie now, though. Does it taste okay?”

”...It’s edible,” Cas said as if trying to figure out the angle with which to pick up the question and shake out an answer.

“Yeah, but how did it taste?”

“I. Am not sure.” Cas looked completely lost. 

“You can taste it though, right?”

“Yes. I could taste it before too. I could perceive every aromatic and molecule a lot better than you can.”

“Except you didn’t.”

“...No...I can’t quite define it, but the sensation of taste is different now. It’s more...structured. It’s better integrated. More intense as a result, more involving. It’s interesting,” Cas repeated yet again. “And not unpleasant,” he concluded after a moment of intense reflection, an obvious full stop to the matter, so Dean didn’t prod further. They talked for awhile about the crazy critters that had once roamed through Norway and that Cas and his garrison had punched back to their home base. Dean didn’t comment when Cas absently ran a finger around the rim of Dean’s empty cup, looked at the smear of coffee intently for a second, then put it in his mouth. 

 

\---

 

An hour later, they were back in Kansas. It was past nine in the evening. Dean went to tell Sam they were home. Sam was in his room reading a book - a sci-fi novel rather than a this-shit-be-real-and-scary book the younger Winchester read as a Legacy far too often. 

“Have fun? Was it revealing?” Sam asked with a grin full of teeth.

“It was awesome. Want me to tell you about it?”

The two brothers eyed each other, a game of chicken that Sam lost by a whisker, returning to his book with a grumbled, “No thanks, want to keep my dinner.”

“Uh-uh. Cas and I are calling it a night.”

“Oh, the _spiritual_ part is over I take it.”

“You know it, Sammy,” said Dean, rat-a-tat-tatting the door jamb with his knuckles and then making a finger gun at his brother. “Take my advice. Put on some earphones.”

“Ugh, Dean-” Dean closed the door proudly, feeling he’d headed off at the pass at least some of the jokes his brother had been lining up since they’d left - though he was sure he was going to hear more about the ‘couple’s retreat’ over the next few days.

“This is an interesting approach Sam has chosen,” Cas said, leaning over some papers on the library table. “I had not thought to link these-” and then Dean grabbed him by the trench coat sleeve and was pulling him off in the direction of Dean’s bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To every Norwegian out there, please accept my apologies for taking the name of your country and turning it into a noun/verb describing the act of getting groped by an angel -_-; 
> 
> This is not a thing I ever thought I would need to apologize for, incidentally.


	8. Shower of Sparks

Just because Cas could make all their clothes leap off - and fold themselves neatly on a nearby chair - didn’t mean that this was going to happen every time. Because Dean had discovered one great thing about hooking up with a guy who wore a tie and a bunch of layers. They were fun to take off. 

Cas was sitting on the bed, legs stretched out before him on the covers and hands behind him propping him up, looking at Dean with the usual blend of curiosity and pleasure reserved for these moments. Dean knew that a chunk of the pleasure was in fact reflected from Dean himself, but he found it didn’t bother him anymore. ‘Cause it was still shared, and it was still pleasure, because he knew where a few of Cas’s buttons were now, and because of Norway and feathers and everything else. 

“We’re moving onto the next chapter,” Dean declared, putting his knees on either side of Cas’s legs, hand braced on his hips. He was still in his jeans, Cas still had his pants on, but that wasn’t going to last. Shoes and socks and shirts and stuff had already landed a few feet away.

Cas tipped his head. “Of which book?”

“The one I’ll write when I get too old for hunting. If the teenage twats have stopped suckling on their vampire wannabes by then, I could be the next big thing. Make some real money and never have to scam a credit card again.”

That got him a frowny look, as if Cas suspected Dean was confusing him on purpose.

Dean rested his arms on those nicely shaped shoulders. “We’ve done everything else in the book. We even did something that doesn’t have a name in human terms and would probably make the book turn inside out if I managed to write it down. So we just got one more cherry to pop here.”

“Dean. Explain. Properly. Using words that make sense when put together,” Cas ground out.

“Picky bastard.” Dean edged forward until he was almost in Cas’s lap and rubbed suggestively.

Cas’s expression didn’t change by the tiniest increment. Right. 

“Dude, I want you to screw me.”

“You do?” Cas asked in a puzzled and slightly concerned tone, which wasn’t the reaction Dean would have expected from a human, so yeah, situation normal then.

“Why not?”

“You had a very strong reaction to the notion during your...‘hookups’.” 

Right. Cas had had him under close observation, and if it was obvious to one-night stands, it must have eventually percolated through to the constant watcher who cared so much about him. 

“Yeah, like hell I’d let a Joe Blow I don’t know screw me. Don’t compare us to some random motel thing.”

“But you didn’t want us to do this before either,” Cas countered without any hint of judgment in his tone, just a simple statement. 

“Picked up on that, huh? But you see, there’s a part of me deep down that really wants it, it’s just a part that I got real good at ignoring because-...well, a lot of shit happened.” That’d be what they put on his tombstone when some end-of-the-world critter or other finally nailed him. ‘A lot of shit happened’.

“Hell?” Cas asked directly without any attempt at cushioning his implications. Without any attempt at pity or cloying feelings either, which Dean appreciated.

“You’d think so, but no. That’s kind of my point.” Dean relaxed, sitting back a bit until he was on his knees over Cas’s thighs, and blew out a noisy breath. “Life’s made me hard, Cas. Not saying that to brag. If it wasn’t the case, I’d be the one clapped up in a lighthouse somewhere. Hell brought me low, sure. But I pulled myself up by the ‘nads to help stuff Lucifer back in the box. You and I did for Dick Roman, then we gave Purgatory a run for its money. We just never _stopped._ ”

Purgatory had actually been a violent form of therapy, in an odd way. Cold clarity, kill or be killed. The monsters weren’t after his soul, weren’t out to break him or trick him into another end-world scenario. They just wanted to kill him and eat him. And Dean punched back just as hard if not harder. By the time he’d clawed his way once more back to Earth, Hell had become just one more entry in the ‘a lot of shit happened’ list. Hadn’t even been his body - that had been through its own ups and downs. If Cas wasn’t around to heal them, he and Sam would look like extras rejected from a Romero remake for being too gruesome for anything less than an X rating. And Dean was still around, still too ornery to give up and let the world collapse under the next disaster that was undoubtedly around the bend. In the unlikely event God played one last joke on him the day Dean split from this mortal coil - shooting and kicking and swearing - and in His Divine dickishness made him a Saint, he’d be the Saint of ‘Don’t Know When To Quit’. 

“I’ve dealt with my Hell baggage. I’ve dealt with the baggage that landed on top of my Hell baggage. I’ve put through an entire LAX terminal worth of suitcases full of shit through those little rubber doohickeys they have at the end of their moving carpets. That ain’t even in the rearview mirror anymore, we’re so far past that. But all that stuff, it just makes it hard for me to...relax. Kind of. Okay, you know what? This the part where I have to cry uncle. I am not going to even try to put this into words. Sam’s the chatty Winchester, I’m the man of action.” 

“I have noticed,” said Cas, which might or might not have been sarcasm, it was sometimes hard to tell. 

“So long story short, we’re gonna do this. But if you’re worried I’m not all in, or if you need...well...pointers or something. You can...you know...” Dean tapped his skull with his knuckles.

Cas’s thousand yard stare hit a thousand and one, spearing right through Dean’s forehead like an icepick. “Dean. _Words._ ”

“I just said I don’t do the talky-feely stuff. So if you need to, you can go a little deeper into my thoughts than the broadcast channel. A little bit - just the sex stuff. Only steer clear of anything I picked up from anime, that’d just confuse you.” And if you run into any weird voices in my noggin, just ignore them _yeah, better ignore them, ‘cause if you look too close, angel, you’re bound to run away_ shut up.

Cas’s eyes flew open wide and he stared - and well he might, because taking it up the ass was nothing compared to what Dean had just offered. But he had the feeling Cas was going to need a helping hand with this, this was still so far outside his realm of experience. Dean was talking about the difference between catching and pitching. Cas was not only out of the diamond, he wasn’t even practicing the same sport, he was off parasailing or something. Dean remembered feeling badly out of his element in Norway and he hadn’t even been an active participant in any shape or form there, so yeah, it felt right to give the angel a leg-up with this, give him a road map. Dean was cool with it. Cas had already intruded- that is to say, had accidentally overheard stuff before in dreams and shit, so really, no big. Dean trusted Cas with his life, he could trust him with this.

Slowly those blue eyes narrowed, still fixed unblinkingly on Dean’s face. Cas extricated his legs out from beneath Dean’s, and got to his knees on the bed, facing him. He lifted his hands to Dean’s face. Dean, hands on hips, stayed perfectly relaxed, brazenly so. 

Cas put both hands along Dean’s jawline, looked him straight in the eye and said, “No.”

Dean blinked. “I just said I’m cool-“

“I appreciate the gesture. But I don’t want to. You.” Cas’s hands were firm, fingertips on Dean’s cheek, jaw and neck, a thumb slowly reaching up to brush Dean’s lips once. “You are a poem of blood and bone, sinew and nerve, of desires running just under the skin. I am starting to understand this language of yours.”

“...damn, the book thing was just a joke, Cas,” said Dean to reaffirm his dude-hood, Cas had just said he was a fucking poem for fuck’s sake. 

Cas ignored that - maybe he was starting to learn to filter out some of Dean’s off-the-cuff crap. His hands slipped down Dean’s shoulder-blades as he brought them together, hands pressing along Dean’s back a lot harder than any chick would.

“Let me try. If you say you want this, then I believe you. You do not need to persuade me. And this is the way sex should be done. Something guessed and given, not picked up like an instruction manual. I know you’ll tell me if I make a mistake.” He was talking into Dean’s ear, against the skin of Dean’s neck near the corner of the jaw. “I’ll still be picking up on the bleed-off. So if there’s something you _do_ want me to do.” The voice dropped even more, a sexy rumble like a car engine. “Think of me doing it. Hard.”

Though Cas’s word choice was almost certainly accidental, it still left Dean with his mouth hanging wide open and sagging almost to Cas’s shoulder. He closed it with a click of teeth and swallowed. “Uh. Yeah. Can do.” He had a feeling he was broadcasting some grade-A porn right now, the kind of stuff they made in Sweden.

But start with the basics. This was uncharted territory. Dean took a couple of quick breaths, because this, even now, felt hard. Hard to let go. Hard and exhilarating. He was going to let go and he wasn’t sure Cas was going to have the reflex to reach out and catch him.

_Probably not and won’t that be an epic fail-_

Then it’d be a fail and that would be okay. If they stumbled, if Dean fell flat on his face, then they’d get a good laugh out of it and try again, because Cas didn’t embarrass and it was starting to rub off on Dean too. 

It wasn’t being embarrassed or vulnerable that bothered him, and it certainly wasn’t the thought of getting anything shoved up his ass. Dean collected stab wounds and sutures like regular joes collected baseball cards, it wasn’t the ass stuff that was the problem. It was ditching the part of himself that was always in control, watching over others, giving to others. Some guys could do that just fine from the bottom, Dean knew this intellectually. But for some reason, in his head it’d always seemed linked. He’d screw the other person - guy or girl - and take care of them and make sure it was enjoyed, not the other way around. Now he was going to be the one letting it all go and having someone catch him for a change.

...Time to get on with it because now his own inner monologue was making him cringe. 

“How do you want me?” he whispered into Cas’s ear (would the angel get it? So easy for Cas to do that whole blinking thing and stare and say, how do _you_ want it?)

There was the faintest inhale near Dean’s ear, maybe a question about to form- but then Cas was quiet, hands traveling up and down Dean’s back, making him twitch and shiver.

Then Cas dropped one hand to Dean’s thigh and tugged-

Freaking _monster_ strong! The left hand pulled Dean’s leg up and tilted him while the right hand caught him between the shoulder-blades, firm as the rock of ages. The hand lowered his back to the bed slow and steady - maybe just to be sure Dean was okay with this, or maybe just because Cas could. 

Dean had managed not to yelp, though the ‘Whoa!’ was perhaps louder than it had needed to be for a guy who’d just expressed complete trust a minute before. Cas didn’t comment on that though.

“We’ve had sex in this position several times. I feel familiar with it,” he said, those crazy strong hands lifting Dean’s hips a bit and encouraging his legs to go around Cas’s waist in illustration. “I liked it last time when you took me like this. I think you’ll like it too.”

“Yeah. Think I will,” Dean forced out of a really dry mouth, because Cas saying ‘took me’ was nova-hot, even (especially) when said in that matter-of-fact tone of voice.

Cas went still - utterly still for a few seconds, like he could be. Then he started to move again. He relinquished his position and sank down on the bed next to Dean. Then he started to go over what felt like every inch of Dean with his hands, and a good, oh, a good third at least with his tongue, starting with Dean’s chest, down to his navel...exploring. Then he dropped down lower, slowly tugging Dean’s jeans off as he went. Though Dean noted in passing that Cas’s pants had disappeared like a rabbit back into a magician’s hat. Angels... 

Dean recognized this slow exploration, it was what he had done their first time down to the letter. Cas was imitating. Well, yeah, he still had no instincts, he was going to have to imitate something. Dean reached down, put his hands on Cas’s neck and shoulder as Cas tongued the joint near his hip. Copying what Cas had done back then, that curious trailing of fingers - not that he could see nerve endings glitter and respond to his touch, of course, but he had to do something, and this Cas would recognize.

A hand that could tip a fucking truck over grabbed his wrist, lifted it away and pinned it to the bed near his hip in one undeniable move.

Dean went rigid and slack-jawed - and something like a taser bolt with the bite removed hit him in the sacrum, leaving him shaking just a little, thigh muscles clenching and erection jerking like it’d received its own jolt. 

“Jesus-” the word had escaped him. He stared at the ceiling - wondered if he imagined the faint smile somewhere near his hipbone.

So not just imitating - where did Cas pick that up? Maybe from that similar bolt when he’d grabbed Dean’s hand as the latter reached for the lube last time they’d been in bed, that inexorable undeniable pull that had dragged Dean back and made all sorts of weird desires rise up and do the mambo. 

Cas slid his fingers down Dean’s wrist to hold his hand, palm to palm - but it was still an uncompromising caught-in-cement feel as it settled there, considerably less negotiable than a set of handcuffs. Dean realized that his other hand had fallen to the bed and was lying still in mute obedience to that commanding clasp. Cas didn’t even have to hold that hand down. 

Cas went on taking his time exploring, Dean’s knees and ankles and that little stretch on the inside of the thighs, before giving the fun bits a few licks - but only a few. That hand stayed on Dean’s like a tether, a restraint and an anchor. Dean just lay there and took it - and the very violence of a tough hands-on control freak like Dean forcing himself to lay still was like the thrum of a motor overclocking. But some strange alchemy deep inside turned that feeling of _wrong_ and _I should hate this_ into _right_ and _I want more_.

“Fuck- Cas-” the words died in his mouth and crawled back down his throat where they curled around his chest, because that grip on his hand told him that Cas was going to take his time and there was nothing Dean could do about it. 

Where the hell was Cas picking this up from -

_\- from me, where else? Guy’s still a newbie and I broadcast some kinky submission shit right into his brain. Yeah, that’s just about as humiliating as it can get-_

But _humiliating_ went the way of the rest of those negative feelings, and lit a touch paper of raw excitement along Dean’s spine. It should be mortifying, but Cas _knew_ him, knew this was just a tiny corner of Dean that wanted to unfurl and let him in, him and him alone. Cas wouldn’t judge this or make stupid assumptions about the 99% of Dean that was made of brawn, stubborn gristle and gunpowder burns. He would know just how tough Dean was exactly, tough enough to let that tiny sliver of himself survive despite the mountain of crap that regularly fell on his head. Cas would know. 

Because it was Cas.

So that was why it felt okay to do this now. It was okay to show him this. Shit, Cas had seen all the way down into Dean’s fucked-up soul when he pulled him from Hell, there was nothing left to hide, just new secret places to discover together...which Cas would get and enjoy too - was enjoying from the way his erection was paying heed. 

Having explored Dean’s bottom half - Dean rather expected Cas had mentally chartered a course and divided Dean into sections to a degree of five micron precision - Cas crawled back up the length of Dean’s body. Taking the captive hand as bounty, lifting it up inexorably and pinning it back down near Dean’s head, making Dean shiver. Then Cas’s whole body was in contact and he kissed Dean like no tomorrow was in sight. Dean kept recognizing glimpses of things he’d done to Cas in the past two months, but then Cas would take them in his own direction, guided by what Dean’s broadcast of throbbing desires was hinting, as well as Dean’s nervous system which must be bouncing up and down like an excited puppy whenever he got something right. There was this air of- of serious delight about Cas when he did, as if Dean was something wonderful he wanted to tinker with to figure out every aspect. 

Dean’s neck, ear, collarbone got taste-tested and fingers ran through his hair. Half the girls on the eastern seaboard had managed to figure out Dean liked that, so it was not surprising that Cas’s fingers lingered there. 

Finally Cas pulled back, rolling over to the side where his hand still had Dean’s captive. He didn’t glance down at Dean’s erection like a human would, because he didn’t need to see that proof - that quivering, taut, beading proof - of what a good job he was doing. 

He went still again. Thousand yard stare directed at nada, unless the headboard had done something to deserve a smiting. Dean could almost see an hourglass clocking over under the messy black hair. 

...The body was still, but _Cas_ now...Dean felt a ripple of current flow down every inch of his skin at the thought that the vessel was on standby mode while a Being originally the size of a bloody building, flowed around him like the earth’s magnetic field, always present if undetected, and _looked_ at him and tried to decrypt him. 

Some of Crowley’s choicest insinuations slotted through Dean’s brain, but they’d turned inside out too, because that Being the demon had painted as indifferent had _touched_ Dean, he knew Dean in and out and he still wanted him. The entire focus of a creature billions of years old - and also his best friend - was currently on one thing and only one, and that was giving Dean exactly what he wanted. 

Cas suddenly moved again as if that pause had never taken place (Dean’s brain, still stubbornly fighting against the overwhelming amount of raw feelings involved, provided a ‘ping’ noise like a heavenly microwave delivering a bucket of buttery popped conclusions). Cas inched down, eyes somewhere on Dean’s lower half, then he put his index finger in his mouth, sucked it lightly-

\- Dean’s attention was cemented better than if a whole tub of construction glue had been involved - 

\- drew it out and put it gently between Dean’s legs, sliding towards his asshole.

Dean tensed and his eyes flashed towards the bedside table. Nobody in their right mind actually did that with spit, especially for a first rodeo-

Without the slightest hesitation or even a preliminary caress, Cas just slipped the finger right in.

Dean’s eyebrows shot up and he jumped despite himself. “Whoa! Oh! I rate the lay-on-of-hands astroglide? Good to know.“

“The _what?_ ” Cas, startled, glanced up, head cocked in his usual way. His voice was way too loud and normal after the almost sacred breathless silence that’d preceded it.

That just threw the whole thing out of whack, like trying to coast to neutral on the highway and getting it into reverse. Dean burst out into snorts of laughter, which only doubled at Cas’s puzzled look, the contrast to what came before and the fact that Cas still had _his finger in Dean’s ass!_

“Dean-” and then Cas smiled like he couldn’t help himself. 

“S-okay- s’okay- ” It hadn’t even been all that funny yet Dean couldn’t seem to stop. He’d laughed like that their first night, when Cas had mistakenly zapped them here, and fuck it felt good. Didn’t matter if things had gone off the rails, because, well, it was Cas. And Dean. Wouldn’t be the two of them if there wasn’t a monkey wrench thrown in the works at some point.

A faint chuckle slipped from Cas’s lips, though he also looked a little discombobulated, like he wasn’t sure how to get back into the program now, poor angel.

“That wasn’t the right effect,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked a question. It distracted you.”

His thumb curled up and brushed Dean’s rim gently, a caress that would be awe-inspiring if Dean wasn’t struggling helplessly to stop laughing and snorting. The fact that this was doing all kind of interesting pressure-related things around Cas’s finger just seemed to make it even more ridiculous (in an oddly hot way.)

Cas cocked his head to the other side - like a beautiful cocker spaniel - and said, “Do we need to go back a few steps and try again?” Made Dean sound like a film he could rewind five minutes and unpause to get the same effect.

Dean made a spluttering noise. Then he lifted Cas’s hand - it was no longer capturing his, it was just lying in his palm - and hoisted himself up onto his elbow to lean forwards and kiss the fingers “It’s fine, no worries,” he gasped. “Shit, Cas, I love you, never change, okay?”

...There had probably been a million better times to say that. Yeah, when Dean would be dandling the grandchildren he’d never have on his knee, he could just see himself saying: “First time I told your grandpa Cas I loved him? Oh yeah, it was in bed and he had his finger up my ass. And I was as hard as a fucking stallion despite being bent double with laughter. I’m surprised he didn’t smite me right there for the crime of being a confusing ape in the first degree.” 

Cas didn’t react in the slightest to Dean’s spontaneous word-bomb, but that was because he’d probably figured it out a long time ago. He wouldn’t realize that it was a big deal when said out loud, and that stupid guys like Dean needed a warm-up to those kind of declarations in order to avoid spraining something.

“Did you want me to use your regular lubricant?” he asked with the one getting back on track even if he had to drag Dean over by the ear - which just made Dean chuckle again.

“Are you kidding me? This stuff is amazing, whatever it is. Keep fingering, we’ll get there.”

“Will we?” Cas asked rather dryly. “You are not taking this very seriously now.”

“Make me,” Dean shot back with a feral grin.

Cas gave him a _look_ and then Dean had two fingertips in him, just fingertips but woof, taut - good but taut - and oh yeah, the edge was back, especially when Cas’s thumb did that little caress of pressure on the outside rim again around the new stretch. The whole deal was still rippled through with chuckles and defiant glances, but it was good. Cas shook his off hand free to grab Dean’s thigh and bend him back at the hip into a position that was a little bit vulnerable and embarrassing and it only made Dean laugh real low, hook his hands behind his knees and bend further, double dog dare _that!_

It took a good chunk of time, maybe because Dean wasn’t really approaching this in the right spirit, or more likely because he’d never had anything up there before and his ass was apparently as stubborn and intractable as the rest of him. Cas knew this bit at least - he’d been on the receiving end often enough, and also had the advantage of being able to scrutinize Dean’s nerve endings to tell exactly what went in where at the right time. Dean had wondered if he’d enjoy getting reamed. Some guys didn’t. But by the time Cas got a fair number of fingers in (Dean didn’t actually know how many because it turned out he couldn’t count with his ass) he realized that yeah, he was completely down with this. He’d thought it’d hurt more, especially the first time, but then again he’d left his pain threshold dangling from a pile of monster skulls in Purgatory, or possibly somewhere else, so this failed to register other than as feelings of tension and tightness. As for all the rest of the reasons he might not have gotten on board with this - the trust, the vulnerability, yada yada fuck that, it was Cas.

Despite the long delay, Cas showed angelic patience in getting him ready. Dean showed perfectly human _im_ patience and by the end was writhing up and down on those long, strong fingers like he was doing a fucking pay-per-view and he didn’t care, he just wanted his angel to bang him already.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Cas, I ain’t scared of a little pain, and you can’t do nothing down there you can’t heal anyway.“

“ _Dean-_ ...very well.”

“Finally. Third apocalypse was going to come before you did at this rate.”

Cas didn’t answer directly, but Dean found his whole body jerked up hard onto Cas’s lap by hands that were one tiny push away from leaving bruises that would have oddly matched the hand-print Dean had had on his shoulder once.

Dean got his legs around Cas’s waist and gripped. ”That’s the spirit. Thought you were chickening out.”

Cas huffed in a way that was part amusement, part exasperation, and probably mostly put on - hey, he was getting better at this emoting stuff. And then he had Dean curled up, one hand under his hips holding him with ridiculous ease, the other hand guiding his cock where his fingers had previously been. 

Dean grinned fiercely at the first push in that got past the ring of muscles, didn’t hurt a tiny bit, could barely feel it (though thank god for that long prep after all as well as the angel-patented astroglide, seriously.) 

“Oh yeah, that’s what you wanted-” Dean started to say - had to get the angel in the game too, right? Say something dirty, he had a whole bunch of material prepped since last time.

Burning stretch and the _feel_ of it, holy shit, the feel of Cas - _Cas_ \- moving into him like- 

Cas was staring at him, that blue eyed gaze as straight as the word of god. 

“Yeah- yeah- just like that-“

Huh...he’d been about to...what had he been about to do? Oh, talk- _ohgod_ \- uh, talk to-

“Dean.”

”Y-yeah?”

Cas looked like he was about to say something-

Instead, he just tugged. 

Dean’s whole body just slid down the bed and slowly, very very slowly but inexorably, got pulled right onto that hard cock.

“Fuck!”

Cas didn’t pause, didn’t wait, didn’t ask him if he was okay - because he’d know, he’d fucking _know_ what that had just done to Dean, to feel himself get manhandled right onto that- he’d know Dean’s neurones had gone off like a whole lifetime of fourth of July firecrackers. He just moved Dean’s body - his whole body, six foot one of brawn and killer reflexes - away a few inches and then started moving in him with a rhythm that felt super slow but had an unhurried build-up packaged into it that was going to rip Dean apart when it got to where it was going.

Oh yeah. Back on track. 

“Sh-shit- Cas-“

“Shhhh.”

Dean _liquified_. That was- that was what he’d needed to hear right then. Shh, Dean, shut up and take what I want to give you. Let go of the mouth and the attitude, of the toxic inner voice and that eternal control freak. Shut up already. I got you. 

So he shut up and took it and just _felt_. That slide. The intrusion deep inside that should feel unwelcome but everything was getting flipped ass over tits today because it wasn’t. It felt like it was scratching a deep itch he’d had inside for ever, so long he’d gotten used to it but now it was-oh fuck. Everything spiraled out slowly. The way Dean’s breath was rattling out of his lungs. The clench of his leg muscles when Cas went in at the deepest point, a quiver-twitch of reflex like his mind was stunned but his body knew, knew it wanted to drag Cas in even deeper. The obscene ease of the way Cas was holding him up as if he were nothing. The drip of pre-come from his cock which Cas still hadn’t touched and probably wouldn’t until Dean begged him to. The- the whole thing...

The first stutters passed and Dean let himself relax and meld into the experience. This loosened all kind of things inside and made it easier and even better. Oh yeah. Better than fine. Now he knew why all those guys had let him fuck their asses. He just hoped he’d done half as good a job. And now...new thoughts were crackling up through the haze...

This...this was how it started, this was something he’d needed to accept, but this wasn’t the only thing Dean Winchester was about, no. He could almost taste it. One day - one day real soon - he was going to get Cas deep inside him again, but this time it would be his angel lying on his back and forbidden to move or touch. And then Dean would get on top of the soldier of the lord and ride him like a bronco; give him the occasional illusion of escape only to rope that control right back to the rider again. Because this could be so many things. Today he wanted to use it to unwind and trust someone else to drive for a bit, tomorrow he’d use it to _inflict_ himself on his lover and if Cas thought Dean had been talking dirty before, he was about to get a whole encyclopedia full of- uh, better slow down, he was going to broadcast a lot of static on the channel if he went on, and his angel was doing so well following him up till now. 

It was the _pressure_ , going in and out, it just seemed to - to- always a little inner push like it was _just_ about to hit something that would hurt and when it didn’t it’d just feel so fucking good- 

And then Cas angled a bit and Dean’s body went whitehot and trembling with equal parts shock and pleasure. 

“Oh! Oh fuck! Do- do that again!”

Cas didn’t tell him to shut up this time, he knew he had Dean focused. He didn’t have to tell Dean to shut up, he just did _that_ again. And again. 

The words ‘Do that again’ and ‘Don’t you dare stop’ were coming out any which way and put through a blender, they couldn’t possibly be making any sense, except in the language Cas was starting to learn, the language he could read like braille from his fingertips in the way Dean’s back arched off the bed with a huffed “hah!” followed by more swearing and back to the word smoothie.

Cas’s hands were tightening on his hips. They were going to leave a bruise now. If anything, that made it better. Dean didn’t know what was getting Cas’s engines revved up this time - maybe the bleed-off, maybe being the one in charge and taking Dean apart, maybe something completely different that Dean would need three brains in order to understand but whatever it was, it was doing the job and then some if Dean was any judge. And that made it go from ‘better’ to ‘perfect’. 

“Dean-“

Fuck, that did it. 

Dean didn’t have the time - or the breath - to beg for it. One more thrust and something just _snapped_ and his own hand flew to his cock and squeezed and jerked and pressed down-up and again and hurled him over the edge, completely on instinct.

Fucking indescribable - double the pleasure of just coming, he was coming _and_ he was getting that amazing crackling white tingle shooting up from his ass as Cas’s thrusts hit every erogenous zone known to man. Never gonna be able to do this any other way from now on, was the last semi-coherent thought that crashed through Dean’s mind before the tidal wave swept him away.

He’d blacked out, he’d actually blacked out.

No, that was just his eyes going funky. Wait- what?

Dean blinked hard and the scene leaped back on him in multiple shots like he was getting dogpiled by the details.

Body - jangling, legs like jello, jizz all down his belly and chest, over his hand still loosely clasped on his softening cock-

\- pleasure still barging in on him, because Cas was still thrusting into him deep-hard-good -

Everything bowled over by adrenaline because _fucking shadows at their backs!_

Dean’s messy fingers shot out towards the bedside table and his gun-

\- wait, shadows, know those shadows. 

Cas was gasping. He was holding Dean’s hips up with forgotten one-handed ease, the other hand had ripped free and was resting palm open, fingers wide on Dean’s chest. The overhead lamp was swinging like a pendulum. It was sending shadows of feathers and wings scattering and breaking around every corner.

“Fuck,” said Dean intelligently, staring, because, well, fuck.

“Dean!” 

Cas thrust one more time, face tightening, eyes on Dean’s face like Dean was his holy city, and then something shorted near the ceiling and a shower of sparks made a really poetic backdrop to the angel coming hard in Dean’s body.

“Fuck,” said Dean again, because it bore repeating.

Cas was panting, hand still splayed on Dean’s chest, cock still deep in Dean’s body, tremors as it throbbed deep inside...Dean would have loved to see Cas’s expression but that would be impossible since the fucking light overhead had gone and bloody shorted.

...yeah...that was a thing that had happened.

Dean stared at Cas, blinking owlishly back at him by the light of the emergency exit sign over the room’s door.

A part of Dean - the part that had learned just how much Life hated him and planned his downfall in excruciating detail - knew what was coming next. So did Dean’s more rational side, because really, what else could be expected from a highly trained hunter who also lived in the bunker?

Footsteps at a fast run ended right outside the door. The handle rattled - the lock caught and held despite a large thump and three short hammered blows. _”Dean?! Cas?! You in there?!”_

“Fuck,” Dean muttered for the third time in a much different tone. “Sam! It’s okay! We’re fine!”

“The lights just went out! Half the grid’s gone! Are we under attack?!” The fist hammered again. Dean wondered what was in the other hand. A gun? Their spare angel blade? A grenade?

“No, Sam. Everything is alright,” said Cas, serenely disentangling himself like he did this every day. “I’m sorry, this is my fault.”

“Damn right,” Dean muttered, though in fact his feelings on the matter were rather more convoluted than his tone implied. His body was still shuddering and twitching, particularly at the very odd and slick-messy feeling of Cas sliding _out_ -... 

”...Your fault?” Sam sounded like he had his head right up to the door, trying to hear. He didn’t have angel ears. “Is that what you said? What did you do?”

“I- give me a moment.” Cas made a gesture towards the ceiling. The light came back on (outside, Sam gasped and said ‘oh!’) and was now illuminating Cas as he strode right towards-

“Cas! Clothes!” Dean yelped, and then more strategically, _“Don’t open the door!”_

Cas stopped dead with one hand reaching for the lock, one split second away from a future where Dean’s gloriously naked angel opened the door to Dean’s kid brother with Dean in full view, on his back on the bed with jizz all over his abs and running down the inside of his thighs.

Fortunately there was at least one Standford-smart on-the-ball Winchester in the bunker. 

“We’re not under attack, right?” Sam asked tightly - and now from a prudent three feet away if Dean was any judge.

“No,” said Cas, loudly enough to be heard through the door. “I’m sorry, I lost control of my-“

“Then okay! I’ll be somewhere else!” 

“Lost control, huh?” Dean said, over the sound of his baby brother hoofing it towards the furthest end of the bunker where he was probably going to spend the next hour hiding under a blanket.

“Yes.” Cas turned back to him without the slightest hint of embarrassment. He looked like one of those old marble statues of naked guys in museums, only more hot and less boring. “I’m sorry. These new sensations. I had not expected them to such a degree. They overwhelmed me for a moment.”

The words ‘new sensations’ triggered the memory of a finger in Dean’s pie. Dean mentally whapped himself in the head with a muttered ‘duh’, though his body was too wired to follow in on the act. He should have thought of that, though Cas’s lukewarm reaction to the food experience hadn’t led Dean to jump to conclusions about how other sensations might compute in that angelic head of his. 

”...Did I see wings?”

“Yes.” 

”...Okay.” Dean remembered the hand landing on his chest. “This ain’t Norway.”

“No- I didn’t-” finally a sliver of discomfort, but it passed quickly. “That wasn’t what happened. At all. I would not do that without permission. But I moved too abruptly and our spaces briefly intersected,” Cas went on blithely without explaining _why_ he put his hand on Dean’s chest and what it meant to him now, which Dean carefully bookmarked for future examination along with a few other Cas-related foibles. “In the same way they did on the first day we met in that barn.”

Dean remembered that - vividly - but gave Cas a ‘cut the crap’ look.

“It was similar,” Cas said. “My Wings manifested close to the mundane plane. It caused an electromagnetic pulse through the wiring. Nothing more.”

Dean kept the look going. 

Cas had the decency to drop his gaze to the floor. “Though it was involuntary this time. Because of my distraction.” He straightened and was back to straight-shooter Cas. “Don’t worry, now that I know what to expect, it won’t happen again.“

“Can it be Norway?” Dean asked, finally getting his limbs and the sheets untangled. 

“What?”

“Maybe not go the whole hog, but can you celestially soundproof the room enough where you won’t blow the fuses next time we rock the mattress?” He caught the edge of a sheet, looked down at his stomach and grimaced.

“I might- but I won’t need to,” Cas said, correcting himself. “Now that I am expecting the-“

“Then you get this room warded so we don’t freak Sam out next time you come shouting my name. Right now, though, get your ass back in bed, ‘cause I need a cleanup and a backrub or something to make up for that particular post-fuck drama. Bloody hell, a year in Purgatory and I don’t think my adrenaline levels ever saw this much action as in the past few months. Hooking up with an angel is going to be a lifetime of new and crazy experiences, I can just tell. Good thing I love excitement. And you. Now come over here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short epilogue left, so should be out tomorrow.


	9. Roadkill

“That sounds mind-blowing,” said Sam, awed and a little wistful.

“Yeah, it was pretty nuts,” Dean admitted, pouring some more coffee and wishing he could make it Irish. But Cas had been making noises about liver cells and how he had better things to do with Dean than perpetually heal damage that could be avoided. 

“It’s just...it’s hard to wrap your mind around beings who are so fundamentally different from us.”

“Yeah...”

“Though they still have a lot in common with humans,” Sam added, lifting a finger as if about to make a clever interjection. “It’s not like Vonnegut’s aliens. Time flows the same way for all of us - even if Cas can make the occasional day-trip to the past. He’s got a bunch more senses spread out over a lot of dimensions, but they work overall the same way and he’s a single being, he’s not a hive mind or anything freaky.”

“He still screws up same as us,” Dean said with a shrug, because that’s what made a Winchester in final. 

“But now he’s got a whole brand new category of senses and feelings, this new, uh, integrity with his vessel. Like if we suddenly grew an extra pair of hands that can feel ultraviolet rays. Wow, that must be mind-blowing for him too.”

“Yeah,” Dean grunted into his coffee.

“That’s why he’s been sampling everything in the kitchen.”

And it had only taken five tries to get Cas to understand that he should use his own plate and not snake food off of someone else’s. Cas hadn’t seen the point of getting his own helping since he didn’t need to eat, he just wanted to taste. Sam had thought that was weird. Dean had thought that was weird too - to start with. Watching Cas put one of those long, strong fingers into a dab of mayo on Dean’s plate and then slip it between his lips and lick it off with a thoughtful expression on his face-

It wasn’t that it even required looking sexy (though it did), because right after the thing with the mayo, while Dean was still making choking noises around his bite of home-made burger, Cas had given him a _look_ and suddenly they were in Dean’s room, Dean was sitting at his desk chair and Cas was _fucking kneeling in front of him-_

Cas had asked “May I?” in his usual unruffled tone - he had grasped some essential rules such as requesting permission before engaging, though if he ever thought Dean was going to be physically able to say No in that kind of situation, then he obviously still had a lot to learn about humanity, or at least the portion with a Y chromosome and an active-lifestyle libido. At least Dean had had the forethought to put his burger down on his desk and swallow the bite in his mouth before making a noise that could be considered assent. Then, yeah, it turned out Cas had finally figured out the ‘no breathing required’ advantage of the home team when it came to giving head.

\- halfway there, Cas stopped, stared hard at Dean’s reddened, spit-soaked cock, extended that same long strong finger, scooped the tiny drop of pre-come that beaded from the tip and put _that_ in his mouth.

So yeah. New rule in the bunker. Everybody got their own trough, even if it only contained a molecular smear of food to taste test. No more sampling off of other people’s plates because Sam thought it was weird and possibly unhygienic, and because Dean was now getting raging hard-ons whenever it happened. 

Sam, not knowing about that part or understanding why Dean was suddenly shifting in his chair, was still talking. “He was listening to that Sinatra piece over and over again on the old record player - just the jazz intro. He said he was appreciating the sub-harmonics. And I caught him running his hands under hot water the other day and staring at it like it was the most amazing thing ever. Bet he’s got a lot of questions about all these new sensations. And he’s curious. He probably wants to explore.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, eyes closing by themselves.

“...And I guess that answers my original question then.”

Dean frowned, eyes still closed. Original question...? It was early, he had only had two cups and these days it took at least four to get Dean going. Had there been a question?

Cas was out of the bunker, fetching some weird book for Sam that could only be found in a secret underground library in a temple in Jerusalem. Cas had been mildly horrified at the notion that he might just ‘borrow’ the tome, so he was still over there making a transcription (and translation, because he was an awesome angel like that) of the relevant passages. He’d left right after staring Dean awake at god-no-you’re-joking AM, and was going to be gone for the day. And without being able to pull that rumpled bed-head back against his shoulder for another hour or two of snoozing, Dean had stared grumpily at the ceiling for thirty minutes and then gone in search of coffee as a survival imperative.

Sam had been such a trooper, managing not to ask any probing questions in the past two weeks since Norway despite extreme provocation. So when it turned out it was just the two of them, shooting the breeze over breakfast, Dean decided it was finally time to bring his brother up to speed. Dean had only intended to give him the top five bullet points. Instead he’d talked for over half an hour about Norway and Wings and nerve impulses and dimensions and all the crazy stuff. Because this was Sammy who was super smart and into this math/physics shit, his brainy brother, his family, the guy Dean always chewed things over with. A lot of stuff had just tumbled out in the end, though not the X-rated details.

“...Original question?”

“Yeah.” 

Something amused in Sam’s tone made Dean open his eyes. His brother was smirking.

“Uh...“

“The original question being, hey, Dean, why have you been looking like roadkill every morning for the past two weeks?”

Dean flinched and covered his eyes with his free hand. Fuck...

“Aw, what’s wrong? The bazillion year old virgin running you ragged now he’s gotten a taste? You getting a bit threadbare at the elbows?” 

“Shut. Up.”

“Yeah, you’re not twenty anymore, huh?”

“...God...” Dean sighed, too tired to argue or evade. “Lots of sex every night for weeks with a hot guy who’s really into it? I would have _killed_ to have this happen at twenty. Why did this not happen when I was twenty?”

“Because life hates the Winchesters.”

“Huh. Yeah. A little bit.” But sometimes it did them a solid. Dean would take Cas - and this ache in his back and in other places - at thirty-five, fifty-five or a hundred and five, rather than not have him at all.

Sam’s teasing grin dissolved into a warmer one as he seemed to read that conclusion off his brother’s face.

“Hmf. Now I’m jealous. Does Cas have any sisters?”

“They’re all sisters in a way, have at it. I bet Naomi is free.”

“Naomi, huh? Thanks.”

“She’s got that body-suit permanently according to Cas - rank has its privileges - and I bet she can get some good ol’ school-marm action going.”

“Yeah, I see Naomi as our one-stop solution to global warming,” Sam snorted, getting to his feet. “I’ll manage on my own.”

He clapped Dean on the shoulder as he walked by - snickering as Dean made a faint ‘urg’ sound - and trotted off, leaving Dean to his wonderful, wonderful cup of coffee after a really busy night, one of many in which a curious angel (who didn’t need sleep anyway) was keeping him awake in all sorts of interesting ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading ^__^
> 
> I still have a one-shot in this series, which should be up next weekend, and possibly a few short timestamp ficlets. After that I am somewhat ficced out ^^; I’ll be working on other non-SPN projects, though I hope to finish that short follow-up fic to One Chain Two Blades, and I have a Season 13 humorous piece in the planner, assuming I can finally figure out where to take it...


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